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OLD NEW YORK 


FALSE DAWN 
(The ’Forties ) 


By EDITH WHARTON 


OLD NEW YORK 
THE Op Maip 
New YeEArR’s Day 
Farse DAwn 
THE SPARK 


THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON 

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE 

SUMMER 

THE REEF 

THE MARNE 

FRENCH WAYS AND THEIR MEANING 


COLE: Ur M. 
ART IN FICTION 


OLD NEW YORK 


FALSE DAWN 
(The ’Forties) 


BY 


EDITH WHARTON 


AUTHOR OF “THE AGE OF INNOCENCE,” ETC. 


DECORATIONS BY E. C. CASWELL 





D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 
LONDON :: NEW YORK :: MCMXXIV 


COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 


Copyright, 1923, by The Curtis Publishing Company 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


FALSE DAWN 
(The ’Forties ) 


PART I 


BND 





FALSE DAWN 
(The °Forties) 


I 


AY, verbena and mignonette scent- 

ed the languid July day. Large 
strawberries, crimsoning through sprigs 
of mint, floated in a bowl of pale yellow 
cup on the verandah table: an old Geor- 
gian bowl, with complex reflections on 
polygonal flanks, engraved with the Ray- 
cie arms between lions’ heads. Now and 
again the gentlemen, warned by a men- 
acing hum, slapped their cheeks, their 
brows or their bald crowns; but they did 
so as furtively as possible, for Mr. Halston 
Raycie, on whose verandah they sat, 


[3] 


FALSE DAWN 


would not admit that there were mosqui- 
toes at High Point. 

The strawberries came from Mr. Ray- 
cie’s kitchen garden; the Georgian bowl 
came from his great-grandfather (father 
of the Signer) ; the verandah was that of 
his country-house, which stood on a height 
above the Sound, at a convenient driving 
distance from his town house in Canal 
Street. 

“Another glass, Commodore,” said Mr. 
Raycie, shaking out a cambric handker- 
chief the size of a table-cloth, and apply- 
ing a corner of it to his steaming brow. 

Mr. Jameson Ledgely smiled and took 
another glass. He was known as “the 
Commodore” among his intimates because 
of having been in the Navy in his youth, 
and having taken part, as a midshipman 
under Admiral Porter, in the war of 1812. 
This jolly sunburnt bachelor, whose face 


[4] 


FALSE DAWN 


resembled that of one of the bronze idols 
he might have brought back with him, had 
kept his naval air, though long retired 
from the service; and his white duck 
trousers, his gold-braided cap and shining 
teeth, still made him look as if he might 
be in command of a frigate. Instead of 
that, he had just sailed over a party of 
friends from his own place on the Long 
Island shore; and his trim white sloop was 
now lying in the bay below the point. 
The Halston Raycie house overlooked 
a lawn sloping to the Sound. The lawn 
was Mr. Raycie’s pride: it was mown 
with a scythe once a fortnight, and rolled 
in the spring by an old white horse spe- 
cially shod for the purpose. Below the 
verandah the turf was broken by three 
round beds of rose-geranium, heliotrope 
and Bengal roses, which Mrs. Raycie 
tended in gauntlet gloves, under a small 


[5] 


FALSE DAWN 


hinged sunshade that folded back on its 
carved ivory handle. The house, re- 
modelled and enlarged by Mr. Raycie on 
his marriage, had played a part in the 
Revolutionary war as the settler’s cottage 
where Benedict Arnold had had _ his 
headquarters. A contemporary print 
of it hung in Mr. Raycie’s study; but no 
one could have detected the humble out- 
line of the old house in the majestic stone- 
coloured dwelling built of tongued-and- 
grooved boards, with an angle tower, tall 
narrow windows, and a verandah on cham- 
fered posts, that figured so confidently as 
a “Tuscan Villa” in Downing’s “Land- 
scape Gardening in America.” There 
was the same difference between the rude 
lithograph of the earlier house and the fine 
steel engraving of its successor (with a 
“specimen” weeping beech on the lawn) 
as between the buildings themselves. Mr. 


[6] 


FALSE DAWN 


Raycie had reason to think well of his 
architect. 

He thought well of most things related 
to himself by ties of blood or interest. No 
one had ever been quite sure that he made 
Mrs. Raycie happy, but he was known to 
have the highest opinion of her. So it 
was with his daughters, Sarah Anne and 
Mary Adeline, fresher replicas of the 
lymphatic Mrs. Raycie; no one would 
have sworn that they were quite at ease 
with their genial parent, yet every one 
knew how loud he was in their praises. 
But the most remarkable object within 
the range of Mr. Raycie’s self-approval 
was his son Lewis. And yet, as Jameson 
Ledgely, who was given to speaking his 
mind, had once observed, you wouldn’t 
have supposed young Lewis was exactly 
the kind of craft Halston would have 


Le 


FALSE DAWN 


turned out if he’d had the designing of 
his son and heir. 

Mr. Raycie was a monumental man. 
His extent in height, width and thickness 
was so nearly the same that whichever 
way he was turned one had an almost 
equally broad view of him; and every inch 
of that mighty circumference was so ex- 
quisitely cared for that to a farmer’s eye 
he might have suggested a great agricul- 
tural estate of which not an acre is un- 
tilled. Even his baldness, which was in 
proportion to the rest, looked as if it 
received a special daily polish; and on a 
hot day his whole person was like some 
wonderful example of the costliest irri- 
gation. There was so much of him, and 
he had so many planes, that it was fas- 
cinating to watch each runnel of mois- 
ture follow its own particular watershed. 
Even on his large fresh-looking hands the 


[8] 


FALSE DAWN 


drops divided, trickling in different ways 
from the ridges of the fingers; and as 
for his forehead and temples, and the 
raised cushion of cheek beneath each of 
his lower lids, every one of these slopes 
had its own particular stream, its hollow 
pools and sudden cataracts; and the sight 
was never unpleasant, because his whole 
vast bubbling surface was of such a clean 
and hearty pink, and the exuding mois- 
ture so perceptibly flavoured with expen- 
sive eau de Cologne and the best French 
soap. 

Mrs. Raycie, though built on a less 
heroic scale, had a pale amplitude which, 
when she put on her best watered silk (the 
kind that stood alone), and framed her 
countenance in the innumerable blonde 
lace ruffles and clustered purple grapes of 
her newest Paris cap, almost balanced -her 
husband’s bulk. Yet from this full- 


[9] 


FALSE DAWN 


rigged pair, as the Commodore would 
have put it, had issued the lean little runt 
of a Lewis, a shrimp of a baby, a shaver 
of a boy, and now a youth as scant as an 
ordinary man’s midday shadow. 

All these things, Lewis himself mused, 
dangling his legs from the verandah rail, 
were undoubtedly passing through the 
minds of the four gentlemen grouped 
about his father’s bowl of cup. 

Mr. Robert Huzzard, the banker, a tall 
broad man, who looked big in any com- 
pany but Mr. Raycie’s, leaned back, lifted 
his glass, and bowed to Lewis. 

“Here’s to the Grand Tour!” 

“Don’t perch on that rail like a spar- 
row, my boy,” Mr. Raycie said reprov- 
ingly; and Lewis dropped to his feet, and 
returned Mr. Huzzard’s bow. 

“T wasn’t thinking,” he stammered. It 
was his too frequent excuse. 

[ 10 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


Mr. Ambrose Huzzard, the banker’s 
younger brother, Mr. Ledgely and Mr. 
Donaldson Kent, all raised their glasses 
and cheerily echoed: ‘The Grand Tour!” 

Lewis bowed again, and put his lips to 
the glass he had forgotten. In reality, he 
had eyes only for Mr. Donaldson Kent, 
his father’s cousin, a silent man with a lean 
hawk-lke profile, who looked like a retired 
Revolutionary hero, and lived in daily 
fear of the most trifling risk or responsi- 
bility. 

To this prudent and circumspect citizen 
had come, some years earlier, the unex- 
pected and altogether inexcusable demand 
that he should look after the daughter of 
his only brother, Julius Kent. Julius had 
died in Italy—well, that was his own busi- 
ness, if he chose to live there. But to let 
his wife die before him, and to leave a 
minor daughter, and a will entrusting her 


[11] 


FALSE DAWN 


to the guardianship of his esteemed elder 
brother, Donaldson Kent Esquire, of 
Kent’s Point, Long Island, and Great 
Jones Street, New York—well, as Mr. 
Kent himself said, and as his wife said for 
him, there had never been anything, any- 
thing whatever, in Mr. Kent’s attitude or 
behaviour, to justify the ungrateful Julius 
(whose debts he had more than once paid) 
in laying on him this final burden. 

The girl came. She was fourteen, she 
was considered plain, she was small and 
black and skinny. Her name was Bea- 
trice, which was bad enough, and made 
worse by the fact that it had been short- 
ened by ignorant foreigners to Treeshy. 
But she was eager, serviceable and good- 
tempered, and as Mr. and Mrs. Kent’s 
friends pointed out, her plainness made 
everything easy. ‘There were two Kent 
boys growing up, Bill and Donald; and. 
[ 12 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


if this penniless cousin had been com- 
pounded of cream and roses—well, she 
would have taken more watching, and 
might have rewarded the kindness of her 
uncle and aunt by some act of wicked in- 
gratitude. But this risk being obviated 
by her appearance, they could be good- 
natured to her without afterthought, and 
to be goodnatured was natural to them. 
So, as the years passed, she gradually be- 
came the guardian of her guardians; since 
it was equally natural to Mr. and Mrs. 
Kent to throw themselves in helpless reli- 
ance on every one whom they did not 
nervously fear or mistrust. 

“Yes, he’s off on Monday,” Mr. Raycie 
said, nodding sharply at Lewis, who had 
set down his glass after one sip. “Empty 
jt, you shirk!” the nod commanded; and 
Lewis, throwing back his head, gulped 
down the draught, though it almost stuck 


[13 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


in his lean throat. He had already had 
to take two glasses, and even this scant 
conviviality was too much for him, and 
likely to result in a mood of excited volu- 
bility, followed by a morose evening and 
a head the next morning. And he wanted 
to keep his mind clear that day, and to 
think steadily and lucidly of Treeshy 
Kent. | 

Of course he couldn’t marry her—yet. 
He was twenty-one that very day, and 
still entirely dependent on his father. 
And he wasn’t altogether sorry to be 
going first on this Grand Tour. It was 
what he had always dreamed of, pined 
for, from the moment when his infant eyes 
had first been drawn to the prints of 
European cities in the long upper passage 
that smelt of matting. And all that 
Treeshy had told him about Italy had 
confirmed and intensified the longing. 


[14 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


Oh, to have been going there with her— 
with her as his guide, his Beatrice! (For 
she had given him a little Dante of her 
father’s, with a steel-engraved frontis- 
piece of Beatrice; and his sister Mary 
Adeline, who had been taught Italian by 
one of the romantic Milanese exiles, had 
helped her brother out with the gram- 
mar. ) 

The thought of going to Italy with 
Treeshy was only a dream; but later, as 
man and wife, they would return there, 
and by that time, perhaps, it was Lewis 
who would be her guide, and reveal to her 
the historic marvels of her birthplace, of 
which after all she knew so little, except in 
minor domestic ways that were quaint but 
unimportant. 

The prospect swelled her _ suitor’s 
bosom, and reconciled him to the idea of 
their separation. After all, he secretly 

[15 ] 


FALSK DAWN 


felt himself to be still a boy, and it was 
as a man that he would return: he meant 
to tell her that when they met the next 
day. When he came back his character 
would be formed, his knowledge of life 
(which he already thought considerable) 
would be complete; and then no one could 
keep them apart. He smiled in advance 
to think how little his father’s shouting 
and booming would impress a man on his 
return from the Grand Tour. . . 

The gentlemen were telling anecdotes 
about their own early experiences in 
Europe. None of them—not even Mr. 
Raycie—had travelled as extensively as 
it was intended that Lewis should; but 
the two Huzzards had been twice to Eng- 
land on banking matters, and Commo- 
dore Ledgely, a bold man, to France and 
Belgium as well—not to speak of his early 
experiences in the Far East. All three 
[ 16 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


had kept a vivid and amused recol- 
lection, slightly tinged with disapproba- 
tion, of what they had seen— “Oh, those 
French wenches,” the Commodore chuck- 
led through his white teeth—but poor 
Mr. Kent, who had gone abroad on his 
honeymoon, had been caught in Paris by 
the revolution of 1830, had had the fever 
in Florence, and had nearly been arrested 
as a spy in Vienna; and the only satisfac- 
tory episode in this disastrous, and never 
repeated, adventure, had been the fact of 
his having’ been mistaken for the Duke 
of Wellington (as he was trying to slip 
out of a Viennese hotel in his courier’s 
blue surtout) by a crowd who had been— 
“Well, very gratifying in their enthu- 
siasm,’” Mr. Kent admitted. 

“How my poor brother Julius could 
have lived in Europe! Well, look at the 
consequences—”’ he used to say, as if poor 

[17] 


FALSE DAWN 


Treeshy’s plainness gave an awful point 
to his moral. 

“'There’s one thing in Paris, my boy, 
that you must be warned against: those 
gambling-hells in the Pally Royle,” Mr. 
Kent insisted. “I never set foot in the 
places myself; but a glance at the outside 
was enough.” 

“TI knew a feller that was fleeced of a 
fortune there,” Mr. Henry Huzzard con- 
firmed; while the Commodore, at his tenth 
glass, chuckled with moist eyes: “The 
trollops, oh, the trollops—” 

“As for Vienna—” said Mr. Kent. 

“Fiven in London,” said Mr. Ambrose 
Huzzard, “a young man must be on his 
look-out against gamblers. Every form 
of swindling is practised, and the touts are 
always on the look-out for greenhorns; a 
term,” he added apologetically, “which 
[ 18 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


they apply to any traveller new to the 
country.” | 

“In Paris,’ said Mr. Kent, “I was 
once within an ace of being challenged to 
fight a duel.” He fetched a sigh of hor- 
ror and relief, and glanced reassuredly 
down the Sound in the direction of his 
own peaceful roof-tree. 

“Oh, a duel,” laughed the Commodore. 
“A man can fight duels here. I fought a 
dozen when I was a young feller in New 
Erleens.””’ The Commodore’s mother had 
been a southern lady, and after his father’s 
death had spent some years with her 
parents in Louisiana, so that her son’s 
varied experiences had begun early. 
“°’Bout women,” he smiled confidentially, 
holding out his empty glass to Mr. Raycie. 

“The ladies—!” exclaimed Mr. Kent in 
a voice of warning. 

The gentlemen rose to their feet, the 


[ 19 ] 


FALSE DAWN 





Commodore quite as promptly and stead- 
ily as the others. The drawing-room 
window opened, and from it emerged Mrs. 
Raycie, in a ruffled sarsenet dress and 
Point de Paris cap, followed by her two 
daughters in starched organdy with pink 
spencers. Mr. Raycie looked with proud 
approval at his womenkind. 

“Gentlemen,” said Mrs. Raycie, in a 
perfectly even voice, “supper is on the 
table, and if you will do Mr. Raycie and 
myself the favour—”’ 

“The favour, ma’am,” said Mr. Am- 
brose Huzzard, “is on your side, in so 
amiably inviting us.”’ 

Mrs. Raycie curtsied, the gentlemen 
bowed, and Mr. Raycie said: “Your arm 
to Mrs. Raycie, Huzzard. This little 
farewell party is a family affair, and the 
other gentlemen must content themselves 
[ 20 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


with my two daughters. Sarah Anne, 
Mary Adeline—”’ 3 

The Commodore and Mr. John Huz- 
zard advanced ceremoniously toward the 
two girls, and Mr. Kent, being a cousin, 
closed the procession between Mr. Ray- 
cie and Lewis. | 

Oh, that supper-table! The vision of 
it used sometimes to rise before Lewis 
Raycie’s eyes in outlandish foreign places; 
for though not a large or fastidious eater 
when he was at home, he was afterward, 
in lands of chestnut-flour and garlic and 
queer bearded sea-things, to suffer many 
pangs of hunger at the thought of that 
opulent board. In the centre stood the 
Raycie épergne of pierced silver, holding 
aloft a bunch of June roses surrounded by 
dangling baskets of sugared almonds and 
striped peppermints; and grouped about 
this decorative “motif”? were Lowestoft 


[ 21 ] 


FALSE DAWN 





platters heavy with piles of raspberries, 
strawberries and the first Delaware 
peaches. An outer flanking of heaped-up 
cookies, crullers, strawberry short-cake, 
piping hot corn-bread and deep golden 
butter in moist blocks still bedewed from 
the muslin swathings of the dairy, led the 
eye to the Virginia ham in front of Mr. 
Raycie, and the twin dishes of scrambled 
eggs on toast and broiled blue-fish over 
which his wife presided. Lewis could 
never afterward fit into this intricate pat- 
tern the “side-dishes” of devilled turkey- 
legs and creamed chicken hash, the sliced 
cucumbers and tomatoes, the heavy silver 
jugs of butter-coloured cream, the float- 
ing-island, “slips’’ and lemon jellies that 
were somehow interwoven with the solider 
elements of the design; but they were all 
there, either together or successively, and 
so were the towering piles of waffles reel- 
[22] 


FALSE DAWN 


ing on their foundations, and the slender 
silver jugs of maple syrup perpetually 
escorting them about the table as black 
Dinah replenished the supply. 

They ate—oh, how they all ate!— 
though the ladies were supposed only to 
nibble; but the good things on Lewis’s 
plate remained untouched until, ever and 
again, an admonishing glance from Mr. 
Raycie, or an entreating one from Mary 
Adeline, made him insert a languid fork 
into the heap. 

And all the while Mr. Raycie con- 
tinued to hold forth. 

“A young man, in my opinion, before 
setting up for himself, must see the world; 
form his taste; fortify his judgment. He 
must study the most famous monuments, 
examine the organization of foreign so- 
cieties, and the habits and customs of those 
older civilizations whose yoke it has been 

[ 23 ] 


FALSE DAWN 





our glory to cast off. Though he may see 
in them much to deplore and to re- 
prove—” (“Some of the gals, though,” 
Commodore Ledgely was heard to inter- 
ject)—“‘‘much that will make him give 
thanks for the privilege of having been 
born and brought up under our own Free 
Institutions, yet I believe he will also”— 
Mr. Raycie conceded it with magna- 
nimity—‘“be able to learn much.” 

“The Sundays, though,’ Mr. Kent 
hazarded warningly; and Mrs. Raycie 
breathed across to her son: “Ah, that’s 
what I say!” 

Mr. Raycie did not lke interruption; 
and he met it by growing visibly larger. 
His huge bulk hung a moment, like an 
avalanche, above the silence which fol- 
lowed Mr. Kent’s interjection and Mrs. 
Raycie’s murmur; then he crashed down 
on both. 

[ 24 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


“The Sundays—the Sundays? Well, 
what of the Sundays? What is there to 
frighten a good Episcopalian in what we 
call the Continental Sunday? I presume 
that we’re all Churchmen here, eh? No 
puling Methodists or atheistical Unita- 
rians at my table tonight, that I’m aware 
of? Nor will I offend the ladies of my 
household by assuming that they have 
secretly lent an ear to the Baptist ranter 
in the chapel at the foot of our lane. 
No? I thought not! Well, then, I say, 
what’s all this flutter about the Papists? 
Far be it from me to approve of their 
heathenish doctrines—but, damn it, they 
go to church, don’t they? And they have 
a real service, as we do, don’t they? And 
reai clergy, and not a lot of nondescripts 
dressed like laymen, and damned badly 
at that, who chat familiarly with the Al- 
mighty in their own vulgar lingo? No, 


[ 25 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


sir’—he swung about on the shrinking 
Mr. Kent—“it’s not the Church I’m 
afraid of in foreign countries, it’s the 
sewers, sir!” 

Mrs. Raycie had grown very pale: 
Lewis knew that she too was deeply per- 
turbed about the sewers. “And the night- 
air,’ she scarce-audibly sighed. 

But Mr. Raycie had taken up his main 
theme again. “In my opinion, if a young 
man travels at all, he must travel as ex- 
tensively as his—er—means permit; must 
see as much of the world as he can. Those 
are my son’s sailing orders, Commodore; 
and here’s to his carrying them out to the 
best of his powers!” 

Black Dinah, removing the Virginia 
ham, or rather such of its bony structure 
as alone remained on the dish, had man- 
aged to make room for a bowl of punch 
from which Mr. Raycie poured deep 
[ 26 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


ladlefuls of perfumed fire into the glasses 
ranged before him on a silver tray. The 
gentlemen rose, the ladies smiled and 
wept, and Lewis’s health and the success 
of the Grand Tour were toasted with an 
eloquence which caused Mrs. Raycie, with 
a hasty nod to her daughters, and a cover- 
ing rustle of starched flounces, to shep- 
herd them softly from the room. 

“After all,’ Lewis heard her murmur 
to them on the threshold, “your father’s 
using such language shows that he’s in 
the best of humour with dear Lewis.” 


II 


N spite of his enforced potations, 
Lewis Raycie was up the next morn- 
ing before sunrise. 

Unlatching his shutters without noise, 
he looked forth over the wet lawn merged 
in a blur of shrubberies, and the waters 
of the Sound dimly seen beneath a sky full 
of stars. His head ached but his heart 
glowed; what was before him was thrill- 
ing enough to clear a heavier brain 
than his. 

He dressed quickly and completely 
(save for his shoes), and then, stripping 
the flowered quilt from his high mahogany 
bed, rolled it in a tight bundle under his 
arm. Thus enigmatically equipped he 
[ 28 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


was feeling his way, shoes in hand, 
through the darkness of the upper story 
to the slippery oak stairs, when he was 
startled by a candle-gleam in the pitch- 
blackness of the hall below. He held his 
breath, and leaning over the stair-rail saw 
with amazement his sister Mary Adeline 
come forth, cloaked and bonneted, but also 
in stocking-feet, from the passage leading 
to the pantry. She too carried a double 
burden: her shoes and the candle in one 
hand, in the other a large covered basket 
that weighed down her bare arm. 
Brother and sister stopped and stared 
at each other in the blue dusk: the upward 
slant of the candle-light distorted Mary 
Adeline’s mild features, twisting them 
into a frightened grin as Lewis stole down 
to join her. 
“Oh—” she whispered. ‘What in the 
world are you doing here? I was just 
[ 29 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


getting together a few things for that 
poor young Mrs. Poe down the lane, who’s 
so ill—before mother goes to the store- 
room. You won’t tell, will you?” 

Lewis signalled his complicity, and cau- 
tiously slid open the bolt of the front door. 
They durst not say more till they were out 
of ear-shot. On the doorstep they sat 
down to put on their shoes; then they 
hastened on without a word through the 
ghostly shrubberies till they reached the 
gate into the lane. 

“But you, Lewis?” the sister suddenly 
questioned, with an astonished stare at the 
rolled-up quilt under her brother’s arm. 

“Oh, I—. Look here, Addy—” he 
broke off and began to grope in his pocket 
—*T haven’t much about me . . . the old 
gentleman keeps me as close as ever .. . 
but here’s a dollar, if you think that poor 
Mrs. Poe could use it... Id be too 
[ 30 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


a2 


happy . . . consider it a privilege. . . 

“Oh, Lewis, Lewis, how noble, how 
generous of you! Of course I can buy a 
few extra things with it... they never 
see meat unless I can bring them a bit, you 
know ... and I fear she’s dying of a 
decline . . . and she and her mother are 


39 


so fiery-proud.. . She wept with 
gratitude, and Lewis drew a breath of re- 
hef. He had diverted her attention from 
the bed-quilt. 

*““Ah, there’s the breeze,’’ he murmured, 
sniffing the suddenly chilled air. 

“Yes; I must be off; I must be back 
before the sun is up,” said Mary Adeline 
anxiously, “and it would never do if 
mother knew—”’ 

“She doesn’t know of your visits to 
Mrs. Poe?” 

A look of childish guile sharpened 
Mary Adeline’s undeveloped face. ‘She 

[31] 


FALSK DAWN 


does, of course; but yet she doesn’t... 
we ve arranged it so. You see, Mr. Poe’s 
an Atheist; and so father—” 

“I see,” Lewis nodded. “Well, we part 
here; I’m off for a swim,” he said glibly. 
But abruptly he turned back and caught 
his sister’s arm. “Sister, tell Mrs. Poe, 
please, that I heard her husband give a 
reading from his poems in New York two 
nights ago—”’ 

(“Oh, Lewis—you? But father says 
he’s a blasphemer!’’) 

“And that he’s a great poet—a Great 
Poet. Tell her that from me, will you, 
please, Mary Adeline?” 

‘““Oh, brother, I couldn’t . . . we never 
speak of him,” the startled girl faltered, 
hurrying away. 

In the cove where the Commodore’s 
sloop had ridden a few hours earlier a big- 
gish rowing-boat took the waking ripples. 
[ 32 | 


FALSK DAWN 





Young Raycie paddled out to her, fas- 
tened his skiff to the moorings, and hastily 
clambered into the boat. 

From various recesses of his pockets he 
produced rope, string, a carpet-layer’s 
needle, and other unexpected and incon- 
gruous tackle; then, lashing one of the 
oars across the top of the other, and jam- 
ming the latter upright between the for- 
ward thwart and the bow, he rigged the 
flowered bed-quilt on this mast, knotted 
a rope to the free end of the quilt, and 
sat down in the stern, one hand on the 
rudder, the other on his improvised sheet. 

Venus, brooding silverly above a line of 
pale green sky, made a pool of glory in 
the sea as the dawn-breeze plumped the 
lover’s sail. . . 


On the shelving pebbles of another 
cove, two or three miles down the Sound, 
[ 33 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


Lewis Raycie lowered his queer sail and 
beached his boat. A clump of willows on 
the shingle-edge mysteriously stirred and 
parted, and Treeshy Kent was in his arms. 

The sun was just pushing above a belt 
of low clouds in the east, spattering them 
with liquid gold, and Venus blanched as 
the light spread upward. But under the 
willows it was still dusk, a watery green 
dusk in which the secret murmurs of the 
night were caught. 

“'Treeshy—Treeshy!” the young man 
cried, kneeling beside her—and then, a 
moment later: “My angel, are you sure 
that no one guesses—?” 

The girl gave a faint laugh which 
screwed up her funny nose. She leaned 
her head on his shoulder, her round fore- ’ 
head and rough braids pressed against his 
cheek, her hands in his, breathing quickly 
and joyfully. 

[ 34 ] 


FALSK DAWN 





“I thought I should never get here,” 
Lewis grumbled, “with that ridiculous 
bed-quilt—and it’ll be broad day soon! 
To think that I was of age yesterday, 
and must come to you in a boat rigged 
like a child’s toy on a duck-pond! If you 
knew how it humiliates me—” 

“What does it matter, dear, since you’re 
of age now, and your own master?” 

“But am I, though? He says so—but 
it’s only on his own terms; only while I 


do what he wants! You'll see... Ive 
a credit of ten thousand dollars ... ten 
Meee... sand... .dyou hear? .. . 


placed to my name in a London bank; 
and not a penny here to bless myself with 
meanwhile. .. Why, Treeshy darling, 
why, what’s the matter?” 

She flung her arms about his neck, 


and through their innocent kisses he could 
[ 35 ] 


FALSE DAWN 





taste her tears. ‘‘What is it, Treeshy?” 
he implored her. 

“I... oh, I’d forgotten it was to be 
our last day together till you spoke of 
London—cruel, cruel!” she reproached 
him; and through the green twilight of the 
willows her eyes blazed on him like two 
stormy stars. No other eyes he knew 
could express such elemental rage as 
Treeshy’s. 

“You little spitfire, you!” he laughed 
back somewhat chokingly. “Yes, it’s our 
last day—but not for long; at our age two 
years are not so very long, after all, are 
they? And when I come back to you I'll 
come as my own master, independent, 
free—come to claim you in face of every- 
thing and everybody! Think of that, 
darling, and be brave for my sake .. . 
brave and patient . . . as I mean to be!” 
he declared heroically. 

[ 36 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


“Oh, but you—you’ll see other girls; 
heaps and heaps of them; in those wicked 
old countries where they’re so lovely. My 
uncle Kent says the European countries 
are all wicked, even my own poor 
13 ae 

“But you, Treeshy; you'll be seeing 
cousins Bill and Donald meanwhile—see- 
ing them all day long and every day. And 
you know you’ve a weakness for that great 
hulk of a Bill. Ah, if only I stood six- 
foot-one in my stockings I’d go with an 
easier heart, you fickle child!’ he tried to 
banter her. 

“Fickle? Fickle? Me—oh, Lewis!” 

He felt the premonitory sweep of sobs, 
and his untried courage failed him. It 
was delicious, in theory, to hold weeping 
beauty to one’s breast, but terribly alarm- 
ing, he found, in practice. ‘There came 
a responsive twitching in his throat. 

[ 37 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


“No, no; firm as adamant, true as 
steel; that’s what we both mean to be, 
isn’t it, cara?” 

“Caro, yes,’ she sighed, appeased. 

“And you'll write to me regularly, 
Treeshy—long long letters? I may count 
on that, mayn’t I, wherever I am? And 
they must all be numbered, every one 
of them, so that I shall know at once 
if I’ve missed one; remember!” 

“And, Lewis, you'll wear them here?” 
(She touched his breast.) “Oh, not all,” 
she added, laughing, “for they’d make 
such a big bundle that you’d soon have a 
hump in front like Pulcinella—but al- 
ways at least the last one, just the last one. 
Promise!” 

“Always, I promise—as long as they’re 
kind,” he said, still struggling to take a 
spirited line. 

[ 38 | 


FALSE DAWN 


“Oh, Lewis, they will be, as long as 
yours are—and long long afterward... ” 

Venus failed and vanished in the sun’s 
uprising. 


iil 


HE crucial moment, Lewis had 

always known, would be not that of 

his farewell to Treeshy, but of his final 
interview with his father. 

On that everything hung: his imme- 
diate future as well as his more distant 
prospects. As he stole home in the early 
sunlight, over the dew-drenched grass, he 
glanced up apprehensively at Mr. Ray- 
cie’s windows, and thanked his stars that 
they were still tightly shuttered. 

There was no doubt, as Mrs. Raycie 
said, that her husband’s “using language” 
before ladies showed him to be in high 
good humour, relaxed and slippered, as 
it were—a state his family so seldom saw 
him in that Lewis had sometimes imper- 
[ 40 | 


FALSE DAWN 





tinently wondered to what awful descent 
from the clouds he and his two sisters 
owed their timorous being. 

It was all very well to tell himself, as 
he often did, that the bulk of the money 
was his mother’s, and that he could turn 
her round his little finger. What differ- 
ence did that make? Mr. Raycie, the day 
after his marriage, had quietly taken over 
the management of his wife’s property, 
and deducted, from the very moderate 
allowance he accorded her, all her little 
personal expenses, even to the postage- 
stamps she used, and the dollar she put 
in the plate every Sunday. He called 


’ 


the allowance her “pin-money,”’ since, as 
he often reminded her, he paid all the 
household bills himself, so that Mrs. Ray- 
cie’s quarterly pittance could be entirely 
devoted, if she chose, to frills and feathers. 


“And will be, if you respect my wishes, 


[ 41 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


my dear,” he always added. “I like to 
see a handsome figure well set-off, and not 
to have our friends imagine, when they 
come to dine, that Mrs. Raycie is sick 
above-stairs, and I’ve replaced her by a 
poor relation in allapacca.” In compli- 
ance with which Mrs. Raycie, at once flat- 
tered and terrified, spent her last penny 
in adorning herself and her daughters, 
and had to stint their bedroom fires, and 
the servants’ meals, in order to find a 
penny for any private necessity. 

Mr. Raycie had long since convinced 
his wife that this method of dealing with 
her, if not lavish, was suitable, and in fact 
“handsome”’; when she spoke of the sub- 
ject to her relations it was with tears of 
gratitude for her husband’s kindness in 
assuming the management of her prop- 
erty. As he managed it exceedingly well, 
her hard-headed brothers (glad to have 


[ 42 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


the responsibility off their hands, and con- 
vinced that, if left to herself, she would 
have muddled her money away in ill-ad- 
vised charities) were disposed to share 
her approval of Mr. Raycie; though her 
old mother sometimes said helplessly: 
“When I think that Lucy Ann can’t as 
much as have a drop of gruel brought‘up 
to her without his weighing the oat- 
meal... ” But even that was only whis- 
pered, lest Mr. Raycie’s mysterious fac- 
ulty of hearing what was said behind his 
back should bring sudden reprisals on the 
venerable lady to whom he always alluded, 
with a tremor in his genial voice, as “my 
dear mother-in-law—unless indeed she 
will allow me to call her, more briefly but 
more truly, my dear mother.” 

To Lewis, hitherto, Mr. Raycie had 
meted the same measure as to the females 


of the household. He had dressed him 
[ 43 ] 


FALSE DAWN 





well, educated him expensively, lauded 
him to the skies—and counted every 
penny of his allowance. Yet there was a 
difference; and Lewis was as well aware 
of it as any one. 

The dream, the ambition, the passion of 
Mr. Raycie’s life, was (as his son knew) 
to found a Family; and he had only 
Lewis to found it with. He believed in 
primogeniture, in heirlooms, in entailed 
estates, in all the ritual of the English 
“landed” tradition. No one was louder 
than he in praise of the democratic insti- 
tutions under which he lived; but he never 
thought of them as affecting that more 
private but more important institution, 
the Family; and to the Family all his care 
and all his thoughts were given. The re- 
sult, as Lewis dimly guessed, was, that 
upon his own shrinking and inadequate 
head was centred all the passion contained 
[ 44] 


FALSE DAWN 


in the vast expanse of Mr. Raycie’s 
breast. Lewis was his very own, and 
Lewis represented what was most dear to 
him; and for both these reasons Mr. 
Raycie set an inordinate value on the boy 
(a quite different thing, Lewis thought 
from loving him). 

Mr. Raycie was particularly proud of 
his son’s taste for letters. Himself not a 
wholly unread man, he admired intensely 
what he called the “cultivated gentleman” 
—and that was what Lewis was evidently 
going to be. Could he have combined 
with this tendency a manlier frame, and 
an interest in the few forms of sport then 
popular among gentlemen, Mr. Raycie’s 
satisfaction would have been complete; 
but whose is, in this disappointing world? 
Meanwhile he flattered himself that, 
Lewis being still young and malleable, 
and his health certainly mending, two 

[ 45 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


years of travel and adventure might send 
him back a very different figure, physi- 
cally as well as mentally. Mr. Raycie had 
himself travelled in his youth, and was 
persuaded that the experience was forma- 
tive; he secretly hoped for the return of 
a bronzed and broadened Lewis, sea- 
soned by independence and adventure, 
and having discreetly sown his wild oats 
in foreign pastures, where they would not 
contaminate the home crop. 

All this Lewis guessed; and he guessed 
as well that these two wander-years were 
intended by Mr. Raycie to lead up to a 
marriage and an establishment after Mr. 
Raycie’s own heart, but in which Lewis’s 
was not to have even a consulting voice. 

“He’s going to give me all the ad- 
vantages—for his own purpose,” the 
young man summed it up as he went 
[ 46 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


down to join the family at the breakfast 
table. | 

Mr. Raycie was never more resplendent 
than at that moment of the day and season. 
His spotless white duck trousers, strapped 
under kid boots, his thin kerseymere 
coat, and drab piqué waistcoat crossed 
below a snowy stock, made him look as 
fresh as the morning and as appetizing as 
the peaches and cream banked before him. 

Opposite sat Mrs. Raycie, immaculate 
also, but paler than usual, as became a 
mother about to part from her only son; 
and between the two was Sarah Anne, 
unusually pink, and apparently occupied 
in trying to screen her sister’s empty seat. 
Lewis greeted them, and seated himself 
at his mother’s right. __ 

Mr. Raycie drew out his guwillochée 
repeating watch, and detaching it from 


[ 47 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


its heavy gold chain laid it on the table 
beside him. 

“Mary Adeline is late again. It is a 
somewhat unusual thing for a sister to be 
late at the last meal she is to take—for two 
years—with her only brother.” 

“Oh, Mr. Raycie!”’ Mrs. Raycie fal- 
tered. 

“I say, the idea is peculiar. Perhaps,” 
said Mr. Raycie sarcastically, “I am going 
to be blessed with a peculiar daughter.” 

“I’m afraid Mary Adeline is beginning 
a sick headache, sir. She tried to get up, 
but really could not,” said Sarah Anne in 
a rush. 

Mr. Raycie’s only reply was to arch 
ironic eyebrows, and Lewis hastily inter- 
vened: “I’m sorry, sir; but it may be my 
fault—” 

Mrs. Raycie paled, Sarah Anne, 
purpled, and Mr. Raycie echoed with 
[ 48 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


punctilious incredulity: “Your—fault?’ 

“In being the occasion, sir, of last 
night’s too-sumptuous festivity—” 

“Ha—ha—ha!” Mr. Raycie laughed, 
his thunders instantly dispelled. 

He pushed back his chair and nodded 
to his son with a smile; and the two, leav- 
ing the ladies to wash up the teacups (as 
was still the habit in genteel families) 
betook themselves to Mr. Raycie’s study. 

What Mr. Raycie studied in this apart- 
ment—except the accounts, and ways of 
making himself unpleasant to his fam- 
ily—Lewis had never been able to dis- 
cover. It was a small bare formidable 
room; and the young man, who never 
crossed the threshold but with a sinking 
of his heart, felt it sink lower than ever. 
“Now!” he thought. 

Mr. Raycie took the only easy-chair, 
and began. 

[ 49 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


“My dear fellow, our time is short, but 
long enough for what I have to say. Ina 
few hours you will be setting out on your 
great Journey: an important event in the 
life of any young man. Your talents and 
character—combined with your means of 
improving the opportunity—make me 
hope that in your case it will be decisive. 
I expect you to come home from this trip 
a man—” 

So far, it was all to order, so to speak; 
Lewis could have recited it beforehand. 
He bent his head in acquiescence. 

“A man,” Mr. Raycie repeated, “pre- 
pared to play a part, a considerable part, 
in the social life of the community. I 
expect you to be a figure in New York; 
and I shall give you the means to be so.” 
He cleared his throat. “But means are 
not enough—though you must never for- 
get that they are essential. Education, 


[ 50 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


polish, experience of the world; these are 
what so many of our men of standing lack. 
What do they know of Art or Letters? 
We have had little time here to produce 
either as yet—you spoke?” Mr. Raycie 
broke off with a crushing courtesy. 

““I—oh, no,” his son stammered. 

“Ah; I thought you might be about to 
allude to certain blasphemous penny-a- 
liners whose poetic ravings are said to 
have given them a kind of pothouse no- 
toriety.” 

Lewis reddened at the allusion but was 
silent, and his father went on: 

“Where is our Byron—our Scott—our 
Shakespeare? And in painting it is the 
same. Where are our Old Masters? 
We are not without contemporary talent; 
but for works of genius we must still look 
to the past; we must, in most cases, con- 
tent ourselves with copies. .. Ah, here, 


[51] 


FALSE DAWN 


I know, my dear boy, I touch a responsive 
chord! Your love of the ‘arts has not 
passed unperceived; and I mean, I desire, 
to do all I can to encourage it. Your 
future position in the world—your duties 
and obligations as a gentleman and a man 
of fortune—will not permit you to be- 
come, yourself, an eminent painter or a 
famous sculptor; but I shall raise no ob- 
jection to your dabbling in these arts as an 
amateur—at least while you are travelling 
abroad. It will form your taste, strength- 
en your judgment, and give you, I hope, 
the discernment necessary to select for me 
a few masterpieces which shall not be 
copies. Copies,’ Mr. Raycie pursued with 
a deepening emphasis, “are for the less dis- 
criminating, or for those less blessed with 
this world’s goods. Yes, my dear Lewis, 
I wish to create a gallery: a gallery of 
Heirlooms. Your mother participates in 
[ 52 ] 


FALSK DAWN 


this ambition—she desires to see on our 
walls a few original specimens of the 
Italian genius. Raphael, I fear, we can 
hardly aspire to; but a Domenichino, an 
Albano, a Carlo Dolci, a Guercino, a 
Carlo Maratta—one or two of Salvator 
Rosa’s noble landscapes . . . you see my 
idea? ‘There shall be a Raycie Gallery; 
and it shall be your mission to get together 
its nucleus.” Mr. Raycie paused, and 
mopped his flowing forehead. “I believe 
I could have given my son no task more 
to his liking.” 

“Oh, no, sir, none indeed!’ Lewis 
cried, flushing and paling. He had in 
fact never suspected this part of his 
father’s plan, and his heart swelled with 
the honour of so unforeseen a mission. 
Nothing, in truth, could have made him 
prouder or happier. For a moment he 
forgot love, forgot Treeshy, forgot every- 

[ 53 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


thing but the rapture of moving among 
the masterpieces of which he had so long 
dreamed, moving not as a mere hungry 
spectator but as one whose privilege it 
should at least be to single out and carry 
away some of the lesser treasures. He 
could hardly take in what had happened, 
and the shock of the announcement left 
him, as usual, inarticulate. 

He heard his father booming on, de- 
veloping the plan, explaining with his 
usual pompous precision that one of the 
partners of the London bank in which 
Lewis’s funds were deposited was him- 
self a noted collector, and had agreed to 
provide the young traveller with letters 
of introduction to other connoisseurs, both 
in France and Italy, so that Lewis’s ac- 
quisitions might be made under the most 
enlightened guidance. 

“Tt is,’ Mr. Raycie concluded, “in order 
[ 54 ] 


FALSK DAWN 


to put you on a footing of equality with 
the best collectors that I have placed such 
a large sum at your disposal. I reckon 
that for ten thousand dollars you can 
travel for two years in the very best style; 
and I mean to place another five thou- 
sand to your credit”—he paused, and let 
the syllables drop slowly into his son’s 
brain: “five thousand dollars for the pur- 
chase of works of art, which eventually— 
remember—will be yours; and will be 
handed on, I trust, to your sons’ sons 
as long as the name of Raycie survives’ — 
a length of time, Mr. Raycie’s tone 
seemed to imply, hardly to be measured 
in periods less extensive than those of the 
Egyptian dynasties. 

Lewis heard him with a whirling brain. 
Five thousand dollars! The sum seemed 
so enormous, even in dollars, and so in- 
calculably larger when translated into any 

[ 55 | 


FALSE DAWN 


continental currency, that he wondered 
why his father, in advance, had given up 
all hope of a Raphael... “If I travel 
economically,” he said to himself, “and 
deny myself unnecessary luxuries, I may 
yet be able to surprise him by bringing one 
back. And my mother—how magnani- 
mous, how splendid! Now I see why she 
has consented to all the little economies 
that sometimes seemed so paltry and so 
humiliating. . .” 

The young man’s eyes filled with tears, 
but he was still silent, though he longed 
as never before to express his gratitude 
and admiration to his father. He had en- 
tered the study expecting a parting ser- 
mon on the subject of thrift, coupled with 
the prospective announcement of a “suit- 
able establishment” (he could even guess 
the particular Huzzard girl his father had 
in view) ; and instead he had been told to 
[ 56 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


spend his princely allowance in a princely 
manner, and to return home with a gallery 
of masterpieces. “At least,’ he mur- 
mured to himself, “it shall contain a Cor- 


reggio.”’ 
“Well, sir?” Mr. Raycie boomed. 
“Oh, sir—” his son cried, and flung 


himself on the vast slope of the parental 
waistcoat. 

Amid all these accumulated joys there 
murmured deep down in him the thought 
that nothing had been said or done to 
interfere with his secret plans about 
Treeshy. It seemed almost as if his 
father had tacitly accepted the idea 
of their unmentioned engagement; and 
Lewis felt half guilty at not confessing to 
it then and there. But the gods are for- 
midable even when they unbend; never 
more so, perhaps, than at such mo- 
ments... 

[ 57 ] 





PART II 





IV 


EWIS RAYCIE stood on a pro- 
jecting rock and surveyed the sub- 
lime spectacle of Mont Blanc. 

It was a brilliant August day, and the 
air, at that height, was already so sharp 
that he had had to put on his fur-lined 
pelisse. Behind him, at a respectful dis- 
tance, was the travelling servant who, at 
a signal, had brought it up to him; below, 
in the bend of the mountain road, stood 
the light and elegant carriage which had 
carried him thus far on his travels. 

Scarcely more than a year had passed 
since he had waved a farewell to New 
York from the deck of the packet-ship 
headed down the bay; yet, to the young 


[ 61 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


man confidently facing Mont Blanc, noth- 
ing seemed left in him of that fluid and 
insubstantial being, the former Lewis 
Raycie, save a lurking and abeyant fear 
of Mr. Raycie senior. Even that, how- 
ever, was so attenuated by distance and 
time, so far sunk below the horizon, and 
anchored on the far side of the globe, that 
it stirred in its sleep only when a hand- 
somely folded and wafered letter in his 
parent’s writing was handed out across 
the desk of some continental counting- 
house. Mr. Raycie senior did not write 
often, and when he did it was in a bland 
and, stilted strain. He felt at a disad- 
vantage on paper, and his natural sarcasm 
was swamped in the rolling periods which 
it cost him hours of labour to bring 
forth; so that the dreaded quality lurked 
for his son only in the curve of certain 
letters, and in a positively awful way of 


[ 62 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


writing out, at full length, the word 

Esqure. | 
It was not that Lewis had broken with 
all the memories of his past of a year 
ago. Many still lingered in him, or 
rather had been transferred to the new 
man he had become—as for instance his 
tenderness for ‘Treeshy Kent, which, 
somewhat to his surprise, had obstinately 
resisted all the assaults of English keep- 
sake beauties and almond-eyed houris of 
the East. It startled him, at times, to 
find Treeshy’s short dusky face, with its 
round forehead, the widely spaced eyes 
and the high cheek-bones, starting out at 
him suddenly in the street of some legen- 
dary town, or in a landscape of languid 
beauty, just as he had now and again been 
arrested in an exotic garden by the very 
scent of the verbena under the verandah 
at home. His travels had confirmed 
[ 63 | 


FALSE DAWN 


rather than weakened the family view of 
Treeshy’s plainness; she could not be 
made to fit into any of the patterns of 
female beauty so far submitted to him; 
yet there she was, ensconced in his new 
heart and mind as deeply as in the old, 
though her kisses seemed less vivid, and 
the peculiar rough notes of her voice 
hardly reached him. Sometimes, half ir- 
ritably, he said to himself that with an 
effort he could disperse her once for all; 
yet she lived on in him, unseen yet in- . 
effaceable, like the image on a daguerreo- 
type plate, no less there because so often 
invisible. 

To the new Lewis, however, the whole 
business was less important than he had 
once thought it. His suddenly acquired 
maturity made Treeshy seem a petted 
child rather than the guide, the Beatrice, 
he had once considered her; and he prom- 
[ 64 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


ised himself, with an elderly smile, that as 
soon as he got to Italy he would write 
her the long letter for which he was now 
considerably in her debt. 

His travels had first carried him to 
England. There he spent some weeks in 
collecting letters and recommendations 
for his tour, in purchasing his travelling- 
carriage and its numerous appurtenances, 
and in driving in it from cathedral town 
to storied castle, omitting nothing, from 
Abbotsford to Kenilworth, which de- 
served the attention of a cultivated mind. 
From England he crossed to Calais, 
moving slowly southward to the Mediter- 
ranean; and there, taking ship for the 
Pireus, he plunged into pure romance, 
and the tourist became a Giaour. 

It was the East which had made him 
into a new Lewis Raycie; the East, so 
squalid and splendid, so pestilent and so 

[ 65 | 


FALSE DAWN 


poetic, so full of knavery and romance 
and fleas and nightingales, and so differ- 
ent, alike in its glories and its dirt, from 
what his studious youth had dreamed. 
After Smyrna and the bazaars, after 
Damascus and Palmyra, the Acropolis, 
Mytilene and Sunium, what could be left 
in his mind of Canal Street and the lawn 
above the Sound? Even the mosquitoes, 
which seemed at first the only connecting 
link, were different, because he fought 
with them in scenes so different; and a 
young gentleman who had journeyed 
across the desert m Arabian dress, slept 
under goats’-hair tents, been attacked by 
robbers in the Peloponnesus and despoiled 
by his own escort at Baalbek, and by cus- 
toms’ officials everywhere, could not but 
look with a smile on the terrors that walk 
New York and the Hudson river. En- 
cased in security and monotony, that 
[ 66 | 


FALSE DAWN 


other Lewis Raycie, when his little figure 
bobbed up to the surface, seemed like a 
new-born babe preserved in _ alcohol. 
Even Mr. Raycie senior’s thunders 
were now no more than the far-off mur- 
mur of summer lightning on a perfect 
evening. Had Mr. Raycie ever really 
frightened Lewis? Why, now he was not 
even frightened by Mont Blanc! 

He was still gazing with a sense of easy 
equality at its awful pinnacles when an- 
other travelling-carriage paused near his 
own, and a young man, eagerly jumping 
from it, and also followed by a servant 
with a cloak, began to mount the 
slope. Lewis at once recognized the 
carriage, and the light springing figure 
of the young man, his blue coat and swell- 
ing stock, and the scar slightly distorting 
his handsome and eloquent mouth. It 
was the Englishman who had arrived at 

[ 67 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


the Montanvert inn the night before with 
a valet, a guide, and such a cargo of books, 
maps and sketching-materials as threat- 
ened to overshadow even Lewis’s outfit. 

Lewis, at first, had not been greatly 
drawn to the newcomer, who, seated aloof 
in the dining-room, seemed not to see his 
fellow-traveller. The truth was that Lewis 
was dying for a little conversation. His 
astonishing experiences were so tightly 
packed in him (with no outlet save the 
meagre trickle of his nightly diary) that 
he felt they would soon melt into the 
vague blur of other people’s travels un- 
less he could give them fresh reality by 
talking them over. And the stranger 
with the deep-blue eyes that matched his 
coat, the scarred cheek and eloquent lip, 
seemed to Lewis a worthy listener. The 
Englishman appeared to think otherwise. 
He preserved an air of moody abstraction, 
[ 68 | 


FALSE DAWN 


which Lewis’s vanity imagined him to 
have put on as the gods becloud them- 
selves for their secret errands; and the 
curtness of his goodnight was (Lewis 
flattered himself) surpassed only by the 
young New Yorker’s. 

But today all was different. The 
stranger advanced affably, raised his hat 
from his tossed statue-like hair, and en- 
quired with a smile: “Are you by any 
chance interested in the forms of cirrous 
clouds ?”’ 

His voice was as sweet as his smile, and 
the two were reinforced by a glance so 
winning that it made the odd question 
seem not only pertinent but natural. 
Lewis, though surprised, was not discon- 
certed. He merely coloured with the 
unwonted sense of his ignorance, and re- 
plied ingenuously: “I believe, sir, I am 
interested in everything.” 

[ 69 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


‘““A noble answer!” cried the other, and 
held out his hand. 

“But I must add,” Lewis continued 
with courageous honesty, “that I have 
never as yet had occasion to occupy my- 
self particularly with the forms of cirrous 
clouds.” 

His companion looked at him merrily. 
“That,” said he, “is no reason why you 
shouldn’t begin to do so now!”” To which 
Lewis as merrily agreed. “For in order 
to be interested in things,” the other con- 
tinued more gravely, “it is only necessary 
to see them; and I believe I am not wrong 
in saying that you are one of the privileged 
beings to whom the seeing eye has been 
given.” 

Lewis blushed his agreement, and his 
interlocutor continued: ‘You are one of 
those who have been on the road to 
Damascus.” 

[ 70 ] 


FALSE DAWN 





“On the road? I’ve been to the place 
itself!” the wanderer exclaimed, bursting 
with the particulars of his travels; and 
then blushed more deeply at the percep- 
tion that the other’s use of the name had 
of course been figurative. 

The young Englishman’s face lit up. 
“You've been to Damascus—literally 
been there yourself? But that may be 
almost as interesting, in its quite different 
way, as the formation of clouds or lichens. 
For the present,” he continued with a ges- 
ture toward the mountain, “I must devote 
myself to the extremely inadequate ren- 
dering of some of these delicate aiguwilles; 
a bit of drudgery not likely to interest you 
in the face of so sublime a scene. But per- 
haps this evening—if, as I think, we are 
staying in the same inn—you will give me 
a few minutes of your society, and tell me 
something of your travels. My father,” 

[71] 


FALSE DAWN 


he added with his engaging smile, “has 
had packed with my paint-brushes a few 
bottles of a wholly trustworthy Madeira; 
and if you will favour me with your com- 
pany at dinner... ” 

He signed to his servant to inde the 
sketching materials, spread his cloak on 
the rock, and was already lost in his task 


as Lewis descended to the carriage. 


The Madeira proved as trustworthy as 
his host had promised. Perhaps it was its 
exceptional quality which threw such a 
golden lustre over the dinner; unless it 
were rather the conversation of the blue- 
eyed Englishman which made Lewis 
Raycie, always a small drinker, feel that 
in his company every drop was nectar. 

When Lewis joined his host it had been 
with the secret hope of at last being able 
to talk; but when the evening was over 
[72 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


(and they kept it up to the small hours) 
he perceived that he had chiefly listened. 
Yet there had been no sense of suppres- 
sion, of thwarted volubility; he had been 
given all the openings he wanted. Only, 
whenever he produced a little fact it was 
instantly overflowed by the other’s imagi- 
nation till it burned like a dull pebble 
tossed into a rushing stream. For what- 
ever Lewis said was seen by his companion 
from a new angle, and suggested a new 
train of thought; each commonplace item 
of experience became a many-faceted 
erystal flashing with unexpected fires. 
The young Englishman’s mind moved in 
a world of associations and references far 
more richly peopled than Lewis’s; but his 
eager communicativeness, his directness 
of speech and manner, instantly opened 
its gates to the simpler youth. It was 
certainly not the Madeira which sped the 

[73 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


hours and flooded them with magic; but 
the magic gave the Madeira—excellent, 
and reputed of its kind, as Lewis after- 
ward learned—a taste no other vintage 
was to have for him. | 

“Oh, but we must meet again in Italy— 
there are many things there that I could 
perhaps help you to see,” the young Eng- 
lishman declared as they swore eternal 
friendship on the stairs of the sleeping inn. 


Vv 


lke was in a tiny Venetian church, no 
more than a chapel, that Lewis 
Raycie’s eyes had been unsealed—in a 
dull-looking little church not even men- 
tioned in the guide-books. But for his 
chance encounter with the young Eng- 
lishman in the shadow of Mont Blane, 
Lewis would never have heard of the 
place; but then what else that was worth 
knowing would he ever have heard of, he 
wondered ? 

He had stood a long time looking at 
the frescoes, put off at first—he could 
admit it now—by a certain stiffness in the 
attitudes of the people, by the childish 
elaboration of their dress (so different 

[75 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


from the noble draperies which Sir 
Joshua’s Discourses on Art had taught 
him to admire in the great painters), and 
by the innocent inexpressive look in their 
young faces—for even the gray-beards 
seemed young. And then suddenly his 
gaze had lit on one of these faces in par- 
ticular: that of a girl with round cheeks, 
high cheek-bones and widely set eyes 
under an intricate head-dress of pearl- 
woven braids. Why, it was Treeshy— 
Treeshy Kent to the life! And so far 
from being thought “plain,” the young 
lady was no other than the peerless prin- 
cess about whom the tale revolved. And 
what a fairy-land she lived in—full of 
lithe youths and round-faced pouting 
maidens, rosy old men and _ burnished 
blackamoors, pretty birds and cats and 
nibbling rabbits—and all involved and en- 
closed in golden balustrades, in colonnades 
[ 76 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


of pink and blue, laurel-garlands fes- 
tooned from ivory balconies, and domes 
and minarets against summer seas! Lewis’s 
imagination lost itself in the scene; he 
forgot to regret the noble draperies, the 
exalted sentiments, the fuliginous back- 
grounds, of the artists he had come to 
Italy to admire—forgot Sassoferrato, 
Guido Reni, Carlo Dolce, Lo Spagno- 
letto, the Carracci, and even the Transfig- 
uration of Raphael, though he knew it to 
be the greatest picture in the world. 
After that he had seen almost every- 
thing else that Italian art had to offer; 
had been to Florence, Naples, Rome; to 
Bologna to study the Eclectic School, to 
Parma to examine the Correggios and the 
Giulio Romanos. But that first vision 
had laid a magic seed between his lips; 
the seed that makes you hear what the 
birds say and the grasses whisper. Even 


[77 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


if his English friend had not continued 
at his side, pointing out, explaining, in- 
spiring, Lewis Raycie flattered himself 
that the round face of the little Saint 
Ursula would have led him safely and 
confidently past all her rivals. She had 
become his touchstone, his star: how in- 
sipid seemed to him all the sheep-faced 
Virgins draped in red and blue paint after 
he had looked into her wondering girlish 
eyes and traced the elaborate pattern of 
her brocades! He could remember now, 
quite distinctly, the day when he had 
given up even Beatrice Cenci . . . and 
as for that fat naked Magdalen of Carlo 
Dolce’s, lolling over the book she was not 
reading, and ogling the spectator in the 
good old way... faugh! Saint Ursula 
did not need to rescue him from her... . 

His eyes had been opened to a new 
world of art. And this world it was his 
[ 78 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


mission to reveal to others—he, the insig- 
nificant and ignorant Lewis Raycie, as 
“but for the grace of God,” and that 
chance encounter on Mont Blanc, he 
might have gone on being to the end! 
He shuddered to think of the army of 
Neapolitan beggar-boys, bituminous 
monks, whirling prophets, languishing 
Madonnas and pink-rumped amorini who 
might have been travelling home with him 
in the hold of the fast new steam- 
packet. 

His excitement had something of the 
apostle’s ecstasy. He was not only, in a 
few hours, to embrace Treeshy, and be 
reunited to his honoured parents; he was 
also to go forth and preach the new gospel 
to them that sat in the darkness of Salva- 
tor Rosa and Lo Spagnoletto... 


The first thing that struck Lewis was 
[79 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


the smallness of the house on the Sound, 
and the largeness of Mr. Raycie. 

He had expected to receive the opposite 
impression. In his recollection the var- 
nished Tuscan villa had retained some- 
thing of its impressiveness, even when 
compared to its supposed originals. Per- 
haps the very contrast between their 
draughty distances and naked floors, and 
the expensive carpets and bright fires of 
High Point, magnified his memory of the 
latter—there were moments when the 
thought of its groaning board certainly 
added to the effect. But the image of 
Mr. Raycie had meanwhile dwindled. 
Everything about him, as his son looked 
back, seemed narrow, juvenile, almost 
childish. His bluster about Edgar Poe, 
for instance—true poet still to Lewis, 
though he had since heard richer notes; his 
fussy tyranny of his womenkind; his un- 
[ 80 | 


FALSE DAWN 


conscious but total ignorance of most of 
the things, books, people, ideas, that now 
filled his son’s mind; above all, the arro- 
gance and incompetence of his artistic 
judgments. Beyond a narrow range of 
reading—mostly, Lewis suspected, culled 
in drowsy after-dinner snatches from 
Knight’s “Half-hours with the Best 
Authors’”—Mr. Raycie made no pretence 
to book-learning; left that, as he hand- 
somely said, “to the professors.” But on 
matters of art he was dogmatic and ex- 
plicit, prepared to justify his opinions by 
the citing of eminent authorities and of 
market-prices, and quite clear, as his fare- 
well talk with his son had shown, as to 
which Old Masters should be privileged 
to figure in the Raycie collection. 

The young man felt no impatience of 
these judgments. America was a long 
way from Europe, and it was many years 

[ 81] 


FALSE DAWN 





since Mr. Raycie had travelled. He could 
hardly be blamed for not knowing that 
the things he admired were no longer ad- 
mirable, still less for not knowing why. 
The pictures before which Lewis had 
knelt in spirit had been virtually undis- 
covered, even by art-students and critics, 
in his father’s youth. How was an Amer- 
ican gentleman, filled with his own self- 
importance, and paying his courier the 
highest salary to show him the accredited 
““Masterpieces’’—how was he to guess that 
whenever he stood rapt before a Sasso- 
ferrato or a Carlo Dolce one of those un- 
known treasures lurked near by under 
dust and cobwebs? 

No; Lewis felt only tolerance and un- 
derstanding. Such a view was not one 
to magnify the paternal image; but when 
the young man entered the study where 
Mr. Raycie sat immobilized by gout, the 
[ 82 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


swathed leg stretched along his sofa 
seemed only another reason for indul- 
gence . 

Bethape. Lewis thought afterward, it 
was his father’s prone position, the way 
his great bulk billowed over the sofa, and 
the lame leg reached out like a mountain- 
ridge, that made him suddenly seem to 
fill the room; or else the sound of his voice 
booming irritably across the threshold, and 
scattering Mrs. Raycie and the girls with 
a fierce: “And now, ladies, if the hugging 
and kissing are over, I should be glad of 
a moment with my son.” But it was odd 
that, after mother and daughters had 
withdrawn with all their hoops and 
flounces, the study seemed to grow even 
smaller, and Lewis himself to feel more 
like a David without the pebble. 

“Well, my boy,” his father cried, crim- 
son and puffing, “here you are at home 

[ 83 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


again, with many adventures to relate, no 
doubt; and a few masterpieces to show 
me, as I gather from the drafts on my 
exchequer.” 

“Oh, as to the masterpieces, sir, cer- 
tainly,” Lewis simpered, wondering why 
his voice sounded so fluty, and his smile 
was produced with such a conscious mus- 
cular effort. 

“Good—good,” Mr. Raycie approved, 
waving a violet hand which seemed to be 
ripening for a bandage. “Reedy carried 
out my orders, I presume? Saw to it that 
the paintings were deposited with the bulk 
of your luggage in Canal Street?” 

“Oh, yes, sir; Mr. Reedy was on the 
dock with precise instructions. You know 
he always carries out your orders,” Lewis 
ventured with a faint irony. 

Mr. Raycie stared. “Mr. Reedy,” he 
said, ‘‘does what I tell him, if that’s what 
[ 84 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


you mean; otherwise he would hardly have 
been in my employ for over thirty years.” 

Lewis was silent, and his father ex- 
amined him critically. “You appear to 
have filled out; your health is satisfac- 
mirycyvcil... well... Mr. Robert 
Huzzard and his daughters are dining 
here this evening, by the way, and will 
no doubt be expecting to see the latest 
French novelties in stocks and waistcoats. 
Malvina has become a very elegant fig- 
ure, your sisters tell me.” Mr. Raycie 
chuckled, and Lewis thought: “I knew 
it was the oldest Huzzard girl!” while a 
slight chill ran down his spine. 

“As to the pictures,’ Mr. Raycie pur- 
sued with growing animation, “I am laid 
low, as you see, by this cursed affliction, 
and till the doctors get me up again, here 
must I le and try to imagine how your 
treasures will look in the new gallery. 

[ 85 ] 


FALSK DAWN 





And meanwhile, my dear boy, I need 
hardly say that no one is to be admitted to 
see them till they have been inspected by 
me and suitably hung. Reedy shall begin 
unpacking at once; and when we move to 
town next month Mrs. Raycie, God will- 
ing, shall give the handsomest evening 
party New York has yet seen, to show 
my son’s collection, and perhaps .. . eh, 
well? . . . to celebrate another interesting 
event in his history.” 

Lewis met this with a faint but re- 
spectful gurgle, and before his blurred 
eyes rose the wistful face of Treeshy Kent. 

“Ah, well, I shall see her tomorrow,” 
he thought, taking heart again as soon as 
he was out of his father’s presence. 


VI 


R. RAYCIKE stood silent for a long 

time after making the round of the 

room in the Canal Street house where the 
unpacked pictures had been set out. 

He had driven to town alone with 
Lewis, sternly rebuffing his daughters’ 
timid hints, and Mrs. Raycie’s mute but 
visible yearning to accompany him. 
Though the gout was over he was still 
weak and irritable, and Mrs. Raycie, flut- 
tered at the thought of “crossing him,” 
had swept the girls away at his first frown. 

Lewis’s hopes rose as he followed his 
parent’s limping progress. ‘The pictures, 
though standing on chairs and tables, and 
set clumsily askew to catch the light, 

[ 87 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


bloomed out of the half-dusk of the empty 
house with a new and persuasive beauty. 
Ah, how right he had been—how inevi- 
table that his father should own it! 

Mr. Raycie halted in the middle of the 
room. He was still silent, and his face, 
so quick to frown and glare, wore the 
calm, almost expressionless look known to 
Lewis as the mask of inward perplexity. 
“Oh, of course it will take a little time,” 
the son thought, tingling with the eager- 
ness of youth. 

At last, Mr. Raycie woke the echoes by 
clearing his throat; but the voice which 
issued from it was as inexpressive as his 
face. ‘It is singular,” he said, “how little 
the best copies of the Old Masters re- 
semble the originals. For these are Orig- 
inals?” he questioned, suddenly swinging 
about on Lewis. | 

“Oh, absolutely, sir! Besides—” The 
[ 88 | 


FALSE DAWN 


young man was about to add: “No one 
would ever have taken the trouble to copy 
them’’—but hastily checked himself. 
“Besides 
“I meant, I had the most competent 
advice obtainable.” 





“So I assume; since it was the express 
condition on which I authorized your pur- 
chases.”’ 

Lewis felt himself shrinking and his 
father expanding; but he sent a glance 
along the wall, and beauty shed her re- 
viving beam on him. 

Mr. Raycie’s brows projected omi- 
nously; but his face remained smooth and 
dubious. Once more he cast a slow glance 
about him. 

“Tet us,” he said pleasantly, “begin 
with the Raphael.” And it was evident 
that he did not know which way to turn. 

“Oh, sir, a Raphael nowadays—I 

[ 89 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


warned you it would be far beyond my 
budget.” 

Mr. Raycie’s face fell slightly. “I had 
hoped nevertheless . . . for an inferior 
specimen. .. ” Then, with an effort: 
“The Sassoferrato, then.” 

Lewis felt more at his ease; he even 
ventured a respectful smile. “Sassofer- 
rato is all inferior, isn’t he? The fact is, 
he no longer stands . . . quite as he used 
boas 

Mr. Raycie stood motionless: his eyes 
were vacuously fixed on the nearest pic- 
ture. 

“Sassoferrato ...no longer... 2 

“Well, sir, no; not for a collection of 
this quality.” 

Lewis saw that he had at last struck 
the right note. Something large and un- 
comfortable appeared to struggle in Mr. 
Raycie’s throat; then he gave a cough 
[ 90 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


which might almost have been said to 
cast out Sassoferrato. 

There was another pause before he 
pointed with his stick to a small picture 
representing a snub-nosed young woman 
with a high forehead and jewelled coif, 
against a background of delicately inter- 
woven columbines. “Is that,’ he ques- 
tioned, “your Carlo Dolce? The style is 
much the same, I see; but it seems to me 
lacking in his peculiar sentiment.” 

“Oh, but it’s not a Carlo Dolce: it’s a 
Piero della Francesca, sir!” burst in tri- 
umph from the trembling Lewis. 

His father sternly faced him. “It’s a 
copy, you mean? I thought so!” 

“No, no; not a copy; it’s by a great 
painter ...a much greater...” 

Mr. Raycie had reddened sharply at 
his mistake. To conceal his natural an- 
noyance he assumed a still more silken 

[91] 


FALSE DAWN 


manner. “In that case,” he said, “I think 
I should like to see the inferior painters 
first. Where is the Carlo Dolce?” 

“There is no Carlo Dolce,” said Lewis, 
white to the lips. 


The young man’s next distinct recollec- 
tion was of standing, he knew not how 
long afterward, before the armchair in 
which his father had sunk down, almost 
as white and shaken as himself. 

“This,” stammered Mr. Raycie, “this 
is going to bring back my gout... ” But 
when Lewis entreated: “Oh, sir, do let 
us drive back quietly to the country, and 
give me a chance later to explain . . . to 
put my case”... the old gentleman had 
struck through the pleading with a furious 
wave of his stick. 

“Explain later? Put your case later? 
It’s just what I insist upon your doing 


[ 92 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


here and now!” And Mr. Raycie added 
hoarsely, and as if in actual physical 
anguish: “I understand that young John 
Huzzard returned from Rome last week 
with a Raphael.” 

After that, Lewis heard himself—as if 
with the icy detachment of a spectator— 
marshalling his arguments, pleading the 
cause he hoped his pictures would have 
pleaded for him, dethroning the old Pow- 
ers and Principalities, and setting up these 
new names in their place. It was first 
of all the names that stuck in Mr. Ray- 
cie’s throat: after spending a life-time in 
committing to memory the correct pro- 
nunciation of words like Lo Spagnoletto 
and Giulio Romano, it was bad enough, 
his wrathful eyes seemed to say, to have 
to begin a new set of verbal gymnastics 
before you could be sure of saying to a 

[ 93 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


friend with careless accuracy: “And this 
is my Giotto da Bondone.” 

But that was only the first shock, soon 
forgotten in the rush of greater tribula- 
tion. For one might conceivably learn 
how to pronounce Giotto da Bondone, and 
even enjoy doing so, provided the friend 
in question recognized the name and 
bowed to its authority. But to have your 
effort received by a blank stare, and the 
playful request: “You'll have to say that 
over again, please’ —to know that, in go- 
ing the round of the gallery (the Raycie 
Gallery!) the same stare and the same 
request were likely to be repeated before 
each picture; the bitterness of this was so 
great that Mr. Raycie, without exaggera- 
tion, might have likened his case to that 
of Agag. 

“God! God! God! Carpatcher, you 
say this other fellow’s called? Kept him 
[ 94 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


back till the last because it’s the gem of 
the collection, did you? Carpatcher— 
well, he’d have done better to stick to his 
trade. Something to do with those new 
European steam-cars, I suppose, eh?” Mr. 
Raycie was so incensed that his irony was 
less subtle than usual. “And Angelico 
you say did that kind of Noah’s Ark sol- 
dier in pink armour on gold-leaf? Well, 
there I’ve caught you tripping, my boy. 
Not Angelico, Angelica; Angelica Kauff- 
man was alady. And the damned swindler 
who foisted that barbarous daub on 
you as a picture of hers deserves to be 
drawn and quartered—and shall be, sir, 
by God, if the law can reach him! He 
shall disgorge every penny he’s rooked 
you out of, or my name’s not Halston 
Raycie! A bargain... you say the 
thing was a bargain? Why, the price of 
a clean postage stamp would be too dear 

[ 95 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


for it! God—my son; do you realize you 
had a trust to carry out?” 

“Yes, sir, yes; and it’s just because—”’ 

“You might have written; you might at 
least have placed your views before me...” 

How could Lewis say: “If I had, I 
knew you'd have refused to let me buy 
the pictures?” He could only stammer: 
“I did allude to the revolution in taste... 
new names coming up... you may re- 
member...” 

“Revolution! New names! Who says 
so? I had a letter last week from the 
London dealers to whom I especially 
recommended you, telling me that an un- 
doubted Guido Reni was coming into the 
market this summer.” 

“Oh, the dealers—they don’t know!” 

“The dealers .. . don’t? ... Who 
does .. . except yourself?’ Mr. Raycie 
pronounced in a white sneer. 

[ 96 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


Lewis, as white, still held his ground. 
“I wrote you, sir, about my friends; in 
Italy, and afterward in England.” 

“Well, God damn it, I never heard of 
one of their names before, either; no 
more’n of these painters of yours here. I 
supplied you with the names of all the 
advisers you needed, and all the painters, 
too; I all but made the collection for 
you myself, before you started... I was 
explicit enough, in all conscience, wasn’t 
I?” 

Lewis smiled faintly. “That’s what I 
hoped the pictures would be. . .” 

“What? Be what? What'd you mean?” 

“Be explicit... Speak for themselves 

. . make you see that their painters are 
already superseding some of the better- 
known...” 

Mr. Raycie gave an awful laugh. 
“They are, are they?” In whose estima- 

[ 97 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


tion? Your friends’, I suppose. What’s 
the name, again, of that fellow you met 
in Italy, who picked ’em out for you?” 

“Ruskin—J ohn Ruskin,” said Lewis. 

Mr. Raycie’s laugh, prolonged, gath- 
ered up into itself a fresh shower of ex- 
pletives. “Ruskin—Ruskin—just plain 
John Ruskin, eh? And who is this great 
John Ruskin, who sets God A’mighty 
right in his judgments? Who’d you say 
John Ruskin’s father was, now?” 

“A respected wine-merchant in Lon- 
don, sir.” 

Mr. Raycie ceased to laugh: he looked 
at his son with an expression of unut- 
terable disgust. 

“Retail?” 

“Tn. 2 peheve so:. ae 

“Faugh!” said Mr. Raycie. 

“It wasn’t only Ruskin, father... . 


29 


I told you of those other friends in Lon- 
[ 98 | 


FALSE DAWN 


don, whom I met on the way home. They 
inspected the pictures, and all of them 
agreed that... that the collection would 
some day be very valuable.” 

“Some day—did they give you a date 
... the month and the year? Ah, those 
other friends; yes. You said there was a 
Mr. Brown and a Mr. Hunt and a Mr. 
Rossiter, was it? Well, I never heard of 
any of those names, either—except per- 
haps in a trades’ directory.” 

“It’s not Rossiter, father: Dante Ros- 
setti.” 

“Excuse me: Rossetti. And what does 
Mr. Dante Rossetti’s father do? Sell 
macaroni, I presume?” 

Lewis was silent, and Mr. Raycie went 
on, speaking now with a deadly steadi- 
ness: “The friends I sent you to were 
judges of art, sir; men who know what 
a picture’s worth; not one of ’em but 

[ 99 ] 


FALSK DAWN 


could pick out a genuine Raphael. 
Couldn’t you find ’*em when you got to 
England? Or hadn’t they the time to 
spare for you? Youd better not,’ Mr. 
Raycie added, “tell me that, for 1 know 
how they’d have received your father’s 
son.” 

“Oh, most kindly . . . they did indeed, 
Stee 

“Ay; but that didn’t suit you. You 
didn’t want to be advised. You wanted to 
show off before a lot of ignoramuses like 
yourself. You wanted—how’d I know 
what you wanted? It’s as if I’d never 
given you an instruction or laid a charge 
on you! And the money—God! Where'd 
it go to? Buying this? Nonsense—.” 
Mr. Raycie raised himself heavily on his 
stick and fixed his angry eyes on his son. 
“Own up, Lewis; tell me they got it out 
of you at cards. Professional gamblers 


[ 100 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


the lot, I make no dount; your Ruskin 
and your Morris and your Rossiter. 
Make a business to pick up young Ameri- 
can greenhorns on their travels, I dare- 
say... No? Not that, you say? Then— 
women? . . . God A’mighty, Lewis,” 
gasped Mr. Raycie, tottering toward his 
son with outstretched stick, “I’m no blue- 
nosed Puritan, sir, and I’d a damn sight 
rather you told me you'd spent it on a 
woman, every penny of it, than let your- 
self be fleeced like a simpleton, buying 
these things that look more like cuts out 
0 Foxe’s Book of Martyrs than Originals 
of the Old Masters for a Gentleman’s 
Gallery... Youth’s youth... Gad, sir, 
I’ve been young myself... a fellow’s got 
to go through his apprenticeship. . . 
Own up now: women?” 
“Oh, not women if 
“Not even!” Mr. Raycie groaned. “All 
[ 101 ] 





FALSE DAWN 


in pictures, then? Well, say no more to 
me now... Ill get home, Tl get 


33 


home. . . He cast a last apoplectic 
glance about the room. “The Raycie Gal- 
lery! That pack of bones and mummers’ 
finery! ... Why, let alone the rest, 
there’s not a full-bodied female among 
‘em. .. Do you know what those Ma- 
donnas of yours are like, my son? Why, 
there ain’t one of ’em that don’t remind 
me of a bad likeness of poor Treeshy 
Kent. . . I should say youd hired half 
the sign-painters of Europe to do her por- 
trait for you—if I could imagine your 
wanting it... No, sir! I don’t need 
your arm,” Mr Raycie snarled, heaving 
his great bulk painfully across the hall. 
He withered Lewis with a last look from 
the doorstep. “And to buy that you 
overdrew your account’—No, I'll drive 
home alone.”’ 


[ 102 ] 


Vit 


R. RAYCIE did not die till nearly 

a year later; but New York agreed 

it was the affair of the pictures that had 
killed him. 

The day after his first and only sight 
of them he sent for his lawyer, and it 
became known that he had made a new 
will. Then he took to his bed with a re- 
turn of the gout, and grew so rapidly 
worse that it was thought “only proper” 
to postpone the party Mrs. Raycie was 
to have given that autumn to inaugurate 
the gallery. This enabled the family to 
pass over in silence the question of the 
works of art themselves; but outside of the 
Raycie house, where they were never men- 

[ 103 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


tioned, they formed, that winter, a fre- 
quent and fruitful topic of discussion. 
Only two persons besides Mr. Raycie 
were known to have seen them. One was 
Mr. Donaldson Kent, who owed the priv- 
ilege to the fact of having once been to 
Italy; the other, Mr. Reedy, the agent, 
who had unpacked the pictures. Mr. 
Reedy, beset by Raycie cousins and old 
family friends, had replied with genuine 
humility: “Why, the truth is, I never was 
taught to see any difference between one 
picture and another, except as regards 
the size of them; and these struck me as 


smallish . . . on the small side, I would 
SAY: .aayae 
Mr. Kent was known to have unbos- 


omed himself to Mr. Raycie with consid- 
erable frankness—he went so far, it was 
rumoured, as to declare that he had never 
seen any pictures in Italy lke those 
[ 104 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


brought back by Lewis, and begged to 
doubt if they really came from there. But 
in public he maintained that noncommit- 
tal attitude which passed for prudence, 
but proceeded only from timidity; no one 
ever got anything from him but the 
guarded statement: “The subjects are 
wholly inoffensive.” 

It was believed that Mr. Raycie dared 
not consult the Huzzards. Young John 
Huzzard had just brought home a 
Raphael; it would have been hard not to 
avoid comparisons which would have been 
too galling. Neither to them, nor to any 
one else, did Mr. Raycie ever again allude 
to the Raycie Gallery. But when his will 
was opened it was found that he had be- 
queathed the pictures to his son. The rest 
of his property was left absolutely to his 
two daughters. The bulk of the estate 
was Mrs. Raycie’s; but it was known that 

[ 105 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


Mrs. Raycie had had her instructions, and 
among them, perhaps, was the order to 
fade away in her turn after six months of 
widowhood. When she had been laid be- 
side her husband in Trinity church-yard 
her will (made in the same week as Mr. 
Raycie’s, and obviously at his dictation) 
was found to allow five thousand dollars 
‘a year to Lewis during his life-time; the 
residue of the fortune, which Mr. Ray- 
cie’s thrift and good management had 
made into one of the largest in New 
York, was divided between the daughters. 
Of these, the one promptly married a 
Kent and the other a Huzzard; and the 
latter, Sarah Ann (who had never been 
Lewis’s favourite), was wont to say in 
later years: “Oh, no, I never grudged 
my poor brother those funny old pictures. 
You see, we have a Raphael.” 

[ 106 | 


FALSE DAWN 


The house stood on the corner of Third 
Avenue and Tenth Street. It had lately 
come to Lewis Raycie as his share in the 
property of a distant cousin, who had 
made an “old New York will’ under 
which all his kin benefited in proportion 
to their consanguinity. The neighbour- 
hood was unfashionable, and the house in 
bad repair; but Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Ray- 
cle, who, since their marriage, had been 
living in retirement at Tarrytown, im- 
mediately moved into it. 

Their arrival excited small attention. 
Within a year of his father’s death, Lewis 
had married Treeshy Kent. The alliance 
had not been encouraged by Mr. and Mrs. 
Kent, who went so far as to say that their 
niece might have done better; but as that 
one of their sons who was still unmarried 
had always shown a lively sympathy for 
Treeshy, they yielded to the prudent 

[ 107 ] 


FALSK DAWN 


thought that, after all, it was better than 
having her entangle Bill. 

The Lewis Raycies had been four years 
married, and during that time had 
dropped out of the memory of New York 
as completely as if their exile had covered 
half a century. Neither of them had ever 
cut a great figure there. Treeshy had 
been nothing but the Kents’ Cinderella, 
and Lewis’s ephemeral importance, as heir 
to the Raycie millions, had been effaced 
by the painful episode which resulted in 
his being deprived of them. 

So secludec was their way of living, 
and so much had it come to be a habit, 
that when Lewis announced that he had 
inherited Uncle Ebenezer’s house his wife 
hardly looked up from the baby-blanket 
she was embroidering. 

“Uncle Ebenezer’s house in New 
York?” 

[ 108 ] 


IR ai io 8 


FALSE DAWN 


He drew a deep breath. “Now I shall 
be able to show the pictures.” 

“Oh, Lewis—” She dropped the blan- 
ket. “Are we going to live there?” 

“Certainly. But the house is so large 
that I shall turn the two corner rooms 
on the ground floor into a gallery. They 
are very suitably lighted. It was there 
that Cousin Ebenezer was laid out.” 

“Oh, Lewis i 

If anything could have made Lewis 
Raycie believe in his own strength of 
will it was his wife’s attitude. Merely 





to hear that unquestioning murmur of 
submission was to feel something of his 
father’s tyrannous strength arise in him; 
but with the wish to use it more hu- 
manely. 
“You'll like that, Treeshy? It’s been 
dull for you here, I know.” 
She flushed up. “Dull? With you, 
[ 109 | 


FALSE DAWN 


darling? Besides, I like the country. But 
I shall like Tenth Street too. Only—you 
said there were repairs?” 

He nodded sternly. “I shall borrow 
money to make them. If necessary—” he 
lowered his voice—“I shall mortgage the 
pictures.” 

He saw her eyes fill. “Oh, but it won’t 
be! ‘There are so many ways still in which 
I can economize.” 

He laid his hand on hers and turned his 
profile toward her, because he knew it was 
so much stronger than his full face. He 
did not feel sure that she quite grasped 
his intention about the pictures; was not 
even certain that he wished her to. He 
went in to New York every week now, 
occupying himself mysteriously and im- 
portantly with plans, specifications and 
other business transactions with long 
names; while Treeshy, through the hot 
[110] 





FALSE DAWN 


summer months, sat in Tarrytown and 
waited for the baby. 

A little girl was born at the end of the 
summer and christened Louisa . and when 
she was a few weeks old the Lewis Raycies 
left the country for New York. 

“Now!” thought Lewis, as they bumped 
over the cobblestones of Tenth Street 
in the direction of Cousin Ebenezer’s 
house. 

The carriage stopped, he handed out his 
wife, the nurse followed with the baby, 
and they all stood and looked up at the 
house-front. 

“Oh, Lewis—” Treeshy gasped; and 
even little Louisa set up a sympathetic 
wail. 

Over the door—over Cousin Ebenezer’s 
respectable, conservative and intensely 
private front-door—hung a large sign- 

f 111] 


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board bearing; in gold letters on a black 
ground, the inscription: 


GALLERY OF CHRISTIAN ART 


OPEN ON WEEK-DAyYS FROM 2 TO 4 


ADMISSION 25 CENTs. CHILDREN 10 CrEentTs 


Lewis saw his wife turn pale, and 
pressed her arm in his. “Believe me, it’s 
the only way to make the pictures known. 
And they must be made known,” he said 
with a thrill of his old ardour. 

“Yes, dear, of course. But... to 
every one? Publicly?” 

“Tf we showed them only to our friends, 
of what use would it be? Their opinion is 
already formed.” 

She sighed her acknowledgment. “But 
the ... the entrance fee...” 

“If we can afford it later, the gallery 


3? 





will be free. But meanwhile 
[112] 


FALSE DAWN 


“Oh, Lewis, I quite understand!” And 
clinging to him, the still-protesting baby 
in her wake, she passed with a dauntless 
step under the awful sign-board. 

“At last I shall see the pictures prop- 
erly lighted!’ she exclaimed, and turned 
in the hall to fling her arms about her 
husband. 

“It’s all they need .. . to be appre- 
ciated,’ he answered, aglow with her 
encouragement. 


Since his withdrawal from the world it 
had been a part of Lewis’s system never 
to read the daily papers. His wife eagerly 
conformed to his example, and they lived 
in a little air-tight circle of aloofness, as if 
the cottage at Tarrytown had been situ- 
ated in another and happier planet. 

Lewis, nevertheless, the day after the 
opening of the Gallery of Christian Art, 

[113 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


deemed it his duty to derogate from this 
attitude, and sallied forth secretly to buy 
the principal journals. When he re- 
entered his house he went straight up to 
the nursery where he knew that, at that 
hour, Treeshy would be giving the little 
girl her bath. But it was later than he - 
supposed. ‘The rite was over, the baby 
lay asleep in its modest cot, and the 
mother sat crouched by the fire, her face 
hidden in her hands. Lewis instantly 
guessed that she too had seen the papers. 


“'Treeshy—you mustn’t . . . consider 
this of any consequence. . . ,” he stam- 
mered. 


She lifted a tear-stained face. “Oh, 
my darling! I thought you never read the 
papers.” 

“Not usually. But I thought it my 
duty——”’ 

[114] 





FALSE DAWN 


“Yes; I see. But, as you say, what 





earthly consequence e 

“None whatever; we must just be 
patient and persist.” : 

She hesitated, and then, her arms about 
him, her head on his breast: “Only, dear- 
est, I’ve been counting up again, ever so 
carefully; and even if we give up fires 
everywhere but in the nursery, I’m afraid 
the wages of the door-keeper and the 
guardian .. . especially if the gallery’s 
open to the public every day .. .” 

“T’ve thought of that already, too; and 
I myself shall hereafter act as doorkeeper 
and guardian.” 

He kept his eyes on hers as he spoke. 
“This is the test,” he thought. Her face 
paled under its brown glow, and the eyes 
dilated in her effort to check her tears. 
Then she said gaily: “That will be. . 
very interesting, won’t it, Lewis? Hear- 

[115 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


ing what the people say... Because, 
as they begin to know the pictures better, 
and to understand them, they can’t fail 


to say very interesting things... can 
they?” She turned and caught up the 
sleeping Louisa. “Can they .. . oh, 


you darling—darling?” 

Lewis turned away too. Not another 
woman in New York would have been 
capable of that. He could hear all the 
town echoing with this new scandal of his 
showing the pictures himself—and she, so 
much more sensitive to ridicule, so much 
less carried away by apostolic ardour, how 
much louder must that mocking echo ring 
in her ears! But his pang was only mo- 
mentary. The one thought that possessed 
him for any length of time was that of 
vindicating himself by making the pic- 
tures known; he could no longer fix his 
attention on lesser matters. ‘The derision 
[ 116 ] 





FALSE DAWN 


of illiterate journalists was not a thing to 
wince at; once let the pictures be seen by 
educated and intelligent people, and they 
would speak for themselves—especially 
if he were at hand to interpret them. 


Vill 


OR a week or two a great many 
people came to the gallery; but, 
even with Lewis as interpreter, the pic- 
tures failed to make themselves heard. 
During the first days, indeed, owing to 
the unprecedented idea of holding a pay- 
ing exhibition in a private house, and to 
the mockery of the newspapers, the Gal- 
lery of Christian Art was thronged with 
noisy curiosity-seekers; once the aston- 
ished metropolitan police had to be invited 
in to calm their comments and control 
their movements. But the name of “Chris- 
tian Art” soon chilled this class of sight- 
seer, and before long they were replaced 
by a dumb and respectable throng, who 
[ 118 J 


FALSE DAWN 


roamed vacantly through the rooms and 
out again, grumbling that it wasn’t worth 
the money. Then these too diminished; 
and once the tide had turned, the ebb was 
rapid. Every day from two to four Lewis 
still sat shivering among his treasures, or 
patiently measured the length of the de- 
serted gallery: as long as there was a 
chance of any one coming he would not 
admit that he was beaten. For the next 
visitor might always be the one who under- 
stood. 

One snowy February day he had thus 
paced the rooms in unbroken solitude for 
above an hour when carriage-wheels 
stopped at the door. He hastened to 
open it, and in a great noise of silks his 
sister Sarah Anne Huzzard entered. 

Lewis felt for a moment as he used to 
under his father’s glance. Marriage and 
millions had given the moon-faced Sarah 

[119 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


something of the Raycie awfulness; but 
her brother looked into her empty eyes, 
and his own kept their level. 

“Well, Lewis,” said Mrs. Huzzard 
with a simpering sternness, and caught 
her breath. 

“Well, Sarah Anne—I’m happy that 
you've come to take a look at my pic- 
tures.” 

“T’ve come to see you and your wife.” 
She gave another nervous gasp, shook out 
her flounces, and added in a rush: “And 
to ask you how much longer this . . . this 
spectacle is to continue. .. .” 

“The exhibition?” Lewis smiled. She 
signed a flushed assent. 

“Well, there has been a considerable 
falling-off lately in the number of visi- 


99 





tors 
“Thank heaven!” she interjected. 
“But as long as I feel that any one 
[ 120 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


Mieuen so. come ..): I shall be here «)... 
to open the door, as you see.”’ 

She sent a shuddering glance about her. 
“Lewis—I wonder if you realize .. . ?” 

“Oh, fully.” 

“Then why do you go on? Isn’t it 
enough—aren’t you satisfied ?”’ 

“With the effect they have produced?” 

“With the effect you have produced— 
on your family and on the whole of New 
York. With the slur on poor Papa’s 
memory.” 

“Papa left me the pictures, Sarah 
Anne.” 

“Yes. But not to make yourself a 
mountebank about them.” 

Lewis considered this impartially. “Are 
you sure? Perhaps, on the contrary, he 
did it for that very reason.” 

“Oh, don’t heap more insults on our 
father’s memory! Things are bad enough 

[121] 


FALSE DAWN 


without that. How your wife can allow 
it I can’t see. Do you ever consider the 
humiliation to her?” 

Lewis gave another dry smile. “She’s 
used to being humiliated. ‘The Kents 
accustomed her to that.” 

Sarah Anne reddened. “I don’t know 
why I should stay to be spoken to in this 
way. But I came with my husband’s 
approval.” 

“Do you need that to come and see 
your brother?” 

“T need it to—to make the offer I am 
about to make; and which he authorizes.” 

Lewis looked at her in surprise, and she 
purpled up to the lace ruffles inside her 
satin bonnet. 

““Have you come to make an offer for 
my collection?” he asked her, humorously. 

“You seem to take pleasure in insinuat- 
ing preposterous things. But anything 
[ 122 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


is better than this public slight on our 
name.” Again she ran a_ shuddering 
glance over the pictures. “John and I,” 
she announced, “are prepared to double 
the allowance mother left you on condition 
that this ... this ends... for good. 
That that horrible sign is taken down 
tonight.”’ 

Lewis seemed mildly to weigh the pro- 
posal. “Thank you very much, Sarah 
feuoe, he” said, at. length “I’m 
touched ... touched and . . . and sur- 
prised ... that you and John should have 
made this offer. But perhaps, before I 
decline it, you will accept mine: simply to 
show you my pictures. When once you’ve 
looked at them I think you'll under- 
stand———”’ 

Mrs. Huzzard drew back hastily, her 
air of majesty collapsing. “Look at the 
pictures? Oh, thank you... but I can 

[ 123 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


see them very well from here. And be- 
sides, I don’t pretend to be a judge...” 

“Then come up and see Treeshy and 
the baby,” said Lewis quietly. 

She stared at him, embarrassed. “Oh, 
thank you,” she stammered again; and 
as she prepared to follow him: “Then it’s 
no, really no, Lewis? Do consider, my 
dear! You say yourself that hardly any 
one comes. What harm can there be in 
closing the place?” 

“What—when tomorrow the man may 
come who understands?” 

Mrs. Huzzard tossed her plumes de- 
spairingly and followed him in silence. 

“W hat—Mary Adeline?” she exclaimed, 
pausing abruptly on the threshold of the 
nursery. ‘Treeshy, as usual, sat holding 
her baby by the fire; and from a low seat 
opposite her rose a lady as richly furred 
and feathered as Mrs. Huzzard, but with 
[ 124 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


far less assurance to carry off her fur- 
belows. Mrs. Kent ran to Lewis and laid 
her plump cheek against his, while Treeshy 
greeted Sarah Anne. 

“I had no idea you were here, Mary 
Adeline,” Mrs. Huzzard murmured. It 
was clear that she had not imparted her 
philanthropic project to her sister, and 
was disturbed at the idea that Lewis might 
be about to do so. “I just dropped in for 
a minute,” she continued, “‘to see that dar- 


b) 


ling little pet of an angel child—” and 
she enveloped the astonished baby in 
her ample rustlings and flutterings. 

“I’m very glad to see you here, Sarah 
Anne,” Mary Adeline answered with sim- 
plicity. 

“Ah, it’s not for want of wishing that 
I haven’t come before! 'Treeshy knows 
that, I hope. But the cares of a house- 
hold like mine...” 

[ 125 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


“Yes; and it’s been so difficult to get 
about in the bad weather,” ‘Treeshy sug- 
gested sympathetically. 

Mrs. Huzzard lifted the Raycie eye- 
brows. “Has it really? With two pairs of 
horses one hardly notices the weather. . . 
Oh, the pretty, pretty, pretty baby! .. . 
Mary Adeline,” Sarah Anne continued, 
turning severely to her sister, “I shall be 
happy to offer you a seat in my carriage 
if you’re thinking of leaving.” 

But Mary Adeline was a married 
woman too. She raised her mild head and 
her glance crossed her sister’s quietly. “My 
own carriage is at the door, thank you 
kindly, Sarah Anne,” she said; and the 
baffled Sarah Anne withdrew on Lewis’s 
arm. But a moment later the old habit of 
subordination reasserted itself. Mary 
Adeline’s gentle countenance grew as 
[ 126 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


timorous as a child’s, and she gathered up 
her cloak in haste. 

“Perhaps I was too quick... I’m 
sure she meant it kindly,” she exclaimed, 
overtaking Lewis as he turned to come up 
the stairs; and with a smile he stood watch- 
ing his two sisters drive off together in the 
Huzzard coach. 

He returned to the nursery, where 
Treeshy was still crooning over her 
daughter. 

“Well, my dear,” he said, “what do you 
suppose Sarah Anne came for?” And, in 
reply to her wondering gaze: “'I’o buy me 
off from showing the pictures!” 

His wife’s indignation took just the 
form he could have wished. She simply 
went on with her rich cooing laugh and 
hugged the baby tighter. But Lewis felt 
the perverse desire to lay a still greater 
strain upon her loyalty. 

[127] 


FALSE DAWN 


“Offered to double my allowance, she 
and John, if only I'll take down the 
sign!” 

“No one shall touch the sign!” Treeshy 
flamed. 

“Not till I do,” said her husband 
grimly. 

She turned about and scanned him with 


anxious eyes. “Lewis... you?” 
“Oh, my dear . . . they’re right. . . 
It can’t go on forever ...’ He went 


up to her, and put his arm about her and 
the child. “You’ve been braver than an 
army of heroes; but it won’t do. The ex- 
penses have been a good deal heavier than 
I was led to expect. AndI... I can't 
raise a mortgage on the pictures. Nobody 
will touch them.” 

She met this quickly. “No; I know. 
That was what Mary Adeline came 
about.” 

[ 128 | 


FALSE DAWN 


The blood rushed angrily to Lewis’s 
temples. “Mary Adeline—how the devil 
did she hear of it?” 

“Through Mr. Reedy, I suppose. But 
you must not be angry. She was kind- 
ness itself: she doesn’t want you to close 
the gallery, Lewis . .. that is, not as 
long as you really continue to believe in 
it... She and Donald Kent will lend 
us enough to go on with for a year longer. 
That is what she came to say.” 

For the first time since the struggle 
had begun, Lewis Raycie’s throat was 
choked with tears. His faithful Mary 
Adeline! He had a sudden vision of her, 
stealing out of the house at High Point 
before daylight to carry a basket of scraps 
to the poor Mrs. Edgar Poe who was 
dying of a decline down the lane... He 
laughed aloud in his joy. 

“Dear old Mary Adeline! How mag- 

[ 129 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


nificent of her! Enough to give me a 
whole year more...” He pressed his 
wet cheek against his wife’s in a long 
silence. “Well, dear,” he said at length, 
“it’s for you to say—do we accept?” 

He held her off, questioningly, at arm’s 
length, and her wan little smile met his 
own and mingled with it. 

“Qf course we accept!” 


IX 


F the Raycie family, which pre- 
vailed so powerfully in the New 
York of the ’forties, only one of the name 
survived in my boyhood, half a century 
later. Like so many of the descendants 
of the proud little Colonial society, the 
Raycies had totally vanished, forgotten by 
everyone but a few old ladies, one or two 
genealogists and the sexton of Trinity 
Church, who kept the record of their 

graves. | 
The Raycie blood was of course still to 
be traced in various allied families: Kents, 
Huzzards, Cosbys and many others, proud 
to claim cousinship with a “Signer,” but 
already indifferent or incurious as to the 
fate of his progeny. These old New 
[131 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


Yorkers, who lived so well and spent their 
money so liberally, vanished like a pinch 
of dust when they disappeared from their 
pews and their dinner-tables. 

If I happen to have been familiar with 
the name since my youth, it is chiefly be- 
cause its one survivor was a distant cousin 
of my mother’s, whom she sometimes took 
me to see on days when she thought I was 
likely to be good because I had been 
promised a treat for the morrow. 

Old Miss Alethea Raycie lived in a 
house I had always heard spoken of as 
“Cousin Ebenezer’s.” It had evidently, 
in its day, been an admired specimen of 
domestic architecture; but was now re- 
garded as the hideous though venerable 
relic of a bygone age. Miss Raycie, being 
crippled by rheumatism, sat above stairs 
in a large cold room, meagrely furnished 
with beadwork tables, rosewood étagéres 
[ 132 ] 


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and portraits of pale sad-looking people 
in odd clothes. She herself was large and 
saturnine, with a battlemented black lace 
cap, and so deaf that she seemed a sur- 
vival of forgotten days, a Rosetta Stone 
to which the clue was lost. Even to my 
mother, nursed in that vanished tradition, 
and knowing instinctively to whom Miss 
Raycie alluded when she spoke of Mary 
Adeline, Sarah Anne or Uncle Doctor, 
intercourse with her was difficult and 
languishing, and my juvenile interrup- 
tions were oftener encouraged than 
reproved. 

In the course of one of these visits my 
eye, listlessly roaming, singled out among 
the pallid portraits a three-crayon draw- 
ing of a little girl with a large forehead 
and dark eyes, dressed in a plaid frock and 
embroidered pantalettes, and sitting on a 
grass-bank. I pulled my mother’s sleeve 

[ 133 ] 


FALSE DAWN 


to ask who she was, and my mother 
answered: “Ah, that was poor little 
Louisa Raycie, who died of a decline. 
How old was little Louisa when she died, 
Cousin Alethea?”’ 

To batter this simple question into 
Cousin Alethea’s brain was the affair of 
ten laborious minutes; and when the job 
was done, and Miss Raycie, with an air 
of mysterious displeasure, had dropped a 


b) 


deep “Eleven,” my mother was too ex- 
hausted to continue. So she turned to me 
to add, with one of the private smiles we 
kept for each other: “It was the poor 
child who would have inherited the Raycie 
Gallery.” But to a little boy of my age 
this item of information lacked interest, 
nor did I understand my mother’s surrep- 
titious amusement. 

This far-off scene suddenly came back 
to me last year, when, on one of my in- 
[ 134 ] 


FALSK DAWN 


frequent visits to New York, I went to 
dine with my old friend, the banker, John 
Selwyn, and came to an astonished stand 
before the mantelpiece in his new library. 

“Hallo!” I said, looking up at the pic- 
ture above the chimney. 

My host squared his shoulders, thrust his 
hands into his pockets, and affected the air 
of modesty which people think it proper 
to assume when their possessions are ad- 
mired. “The Macrino d’Alba? Y—yes 

. It was the only thing I managed to 
capture out of the Raycie collection.” 

“The only thing? Well i 

“Ah, but you should have seen the 
Mantegna; and the Giotto; and the Piero 
della Francesca—hang it, one of the most 





beautiful Piero della Francescas in the 
world... A girlin profile, with her hair 
in a pearl net, against a background of 
columbines; that went back to Kurope— 

[ 135 | 


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the National Gallery, I believe. And the 
Carpaccio, the most exquisite little St. 
George ... that went to California... 
Lord!’ He sat down with the sigh of a 
hungry man turned away from a groaning 
board. “Well, it nearly broke me buying 
this!’ he murmured, as if at least that fact 
were some consolation. 

I was turning over my early memories 
in quest of a clue to what he spoke of as 
the Raycie collection, in a tone which im- 
plied that he was alluding to objects 
familiar to all art-lovers. 

Suddenly: “They weren’t poor little 
Louisa’s pictures, by any chance?” I 
asked, remembering my mother’s cryptic 
smile. 

Sedwyn looked at me _ perplexedly. 
“Who the deuce is poor little Louisa?’ 
And, without waiting for my answer, he 
went on: “They were that fool Netta 
[ 136 ] 


a em on 


FALSE DAWN 


Cosby's until a year ago—and she never 
even knew it.” 

We looked at each other interrogatively, 
my friend perplexed at my ignorance, and 
I now absorbed in trying to run down the 
genealogy of Netta Cosby. I did so finally. 
“Netta Cosby—you don’t mean Netta 
Kent, the one who married Jim Cosby?” 

“That’s it. ‘They were cousins of the 
Raycies’, and she inherited the pictures.” 

I continued to ponder. “I wanted 
awfully to marry her, the year I left Har- 
vard,” I said presently, more to myself 
than to my hearer. 

“Well, if you had you’d have annexed 
a prize fool; and one of the most beautiful 
collections of Italian Primitives in the 
world.” 

“In the world?” 

“Well—you wait till you see them; if 
you haven’t already. And I seem to make 

[ 137 ] 


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out that you haven’t—that you can’t have. 
How long have you been in Japan? Four 
years? I thought so. Well, it was only 
last winter that Netta found out.” 

“Found out what?” 

“What there was in old Alethea Ray- 
cie’s attic. You must remember ‘the old 
Miss Raycie who lived in that hideous 
house in Tenth Street when we were chil- 
dren. She was a cousin of your mother’s, 
wasn’t she? Well, the old fool lived there 
for nearly half a century, with five mil- 
lions’ worth of pictures shut up in the 
attic over her head. It seems they'd been 
there ever since the death of a poor young 
Raycie who collected them in Italy years 
and years ago. I don’t know much about 
the story; I never was strong on geneal- 
ogy, and the Raycies have always been 
rather dim to me. They were everybody’s 
cousins, of course; but as far as one can 
[ 138 ] 


FALSE DAWN 





make out that seems to have been their 
principal if not their only function. Oh— 
and I suppose the Raycie Building was 
called after them; only they didn’t build it! 
“But there was this one young fellow— 

I wish I could find out more about him. 
All that Netta seems to know (or to care, 
for that matter) is that when he was very 
young—barely out of college—he was sent 
to Italy by his father to buy Old Masters 
—in the forties, it must have been— 
and came back with this extraordinary, 
this unbelievable collection . . . a boy of 
that age! ... and was disinherited by the 
old gentleman for bringing home such 
rubbish. The young fellow and his wife 
died ever so many years ago, both of 
them. It seems he was so laughed at for 
buying such pictures that they went away 
and lived like hermits in the depths of the 
country. There were some funny spectral 
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FALSE DAWN 


portraits of them that old Alethea had up 
in her bedroom. Netta showed me one of 
them the last time I went to see her: a 
pathetic drawing of the only child, an 
anemic little girl with a big forehead. 
Jove, but that must have been your little 
Louisa!” 

I nodded. “In a plaid frock and em- 
broidered pantalettes?” 

“Yes, something of the sort. Well, 
when Louisa and her parents died, I sup- 
pose the pictures went to old Miss Raycie. 
At any rate, at some time or other—and it 
must have been longer ago than you or 
I can remember—the old lady inherited 
them with the Tenth Street house; and 
when she died, three or four years ago, her 
relations found she’d never even been up- 
stairs to look at them.” 

“Well ” 

“Well, she died intestate, and Netta 
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FALSE DAWN 


Kent—Netta Cosby—turned out to be 
the next of kin. There wasn’t much to be 
got out of the estate (or so they thought) 
and, as the Cosbys are always hard up, 
the house in Tenth Street had to be sold, 
and the pictures were very nearly sent off 
to the auction room with all the rest of the 
stuff. But nobody supposed they would 
bring anything, and the auctioneer said 
that if you tried to sell pictures with car- 
pets and bedding and kitchen furniture it 
always depreciated the whole thing; and 
so, as the Cosbys had some bare walls to 
cover, they sent for the lot—there were 
about thirty—and decided to have them 
cleaned and hang them up. ‘After all,’ 
Netta said, ‘as well as I can make out 
through the cobwebs, some of them look 
like rather jolly copies of early Italian 
things.’ But as she was short of cash she 
decided to clean them at home instead of 

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FALSE DAWN 





sending them to an expert; and one day, 
while she was operating on this very one 
before you, with her sleeves rolled up, the 
man called who always does call on such 
occasions; the man who knows. In the 
given case, it was a quiet fellow connected 
with the Louvre, who’d brought her a 
letter from Paris, and whom she’d invited 
to one of her stupid dinners. He was an- 
nounced, and she thought it would be a 
joke to let him see what she was doing; 
she has pretty arms, you may remember. 
So he was asked into the dining-room, 
where he found her with a pail of hot 
water and soap-suds, and this laid out on 
the table; and the first thing he did was 
to grab her pretty arm so tight that it 
was black and blue, while he shouted out: 
‘God in heaven! Not hot water!” 

My friend leaned back with a sigh of 
mingled resentment and satisfaction, and 
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FALSE DAWN 





we sat silently looking up at the lovely 
“Adoration” above the mantelpiece. 

“That’s how I got it a little cheaper— 
most of the old varnish was gone for good. 
But luckily for her it was the first pic- 
ture she had attacked; and as for the 
others—you must see them, that’s all I 
can say... Wait; I’ve got the cata- 
logue somewhere about .. .” 

He began to rummage for it, and I 
asked, remembering how nearly I had 
married Netta Kent: “Do you mean to 
say she didn’t keep a single one of them?” 

“Oh, yes—in the shape of pearls and 
Rolls-Royces. And you’ve seen their new 
house in Fifth Avenue?” He ended with 
a grin of irony: “The best of the joke is 
that Jim was just thinking of divorcing 
her when the pictures were discovered.” 

“Poor little Louisa!” I sighed. (1) 


THE END 











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